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Updated: Jul 15, 2026

Cross-Modal Multivariate Pattern Analysis
Published on: November 9, 2011
Age-related increase in top-down activation of visual features
David J Madden1, Julia Spaniol, Barbara Bucur
1Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC 27710, USA. djm@geri.duke.edu
Abstract:
Previous research suggests that, during visual search and discrimination tasks, older adults place greater emphasis than younger adults on top-down attention. This experiment investigated the relative contribution of target activation and distractor inhibition to this age difference. Younger and older adults performed a singleton discrimination task in which either an E or an R target (colour singleton) was present among distractor letters. Relative to a baseline condition in which the colours of the targets and distractors remained constant, an age-related slowing of performance was evident when either the colour of the target or that of the distractors varied across trials. The age-related slowing was more pronounced in response to target colour variation, suggesting that older adults place relatively greater emphasis on the top-down activation of target features.
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