Priming of two-dimensional visual motion is reduced in older adults

Previously, Y. Jiang, P. Greenwood, and R. Parasuraman (1999) reported that priming of rotating three-dimensional visual objects is age sensitive. The current study investigated whether there is also an age-related difference in priming with simple two-dimensional (2-D) moving stimuli (i.e., whether a prime stimulus moving in a particular direction causes a subsequent ambiguous target stimulus to be seen moving in the same direction as the prime). In 2 experiments, younger and older adults judged the directions of moving sine-wave gratings. Groups differed neither in determining the direction of a single 2-D movement nor in detecting motion reversals in successively moving gratings. However, the older group showed a significant reduction in the extent of 2-D motion priming. The decrement in older adults for visual motion priming may reflect age-related changes in temporal processing in human visual cortex.