Visual attention during seeing for speaking in healthy aging

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Human Aging Research

Background:

• Older adults possess extensive world knowledge, influencing visual search.
• Semantic information aids object localization, but overreliance on it is a concern.
• Age-related attention allocation to scene elements requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate age differences in attention allocation to semantic and visual saliency in real-world scenes.
• To determine if older adults overrely on semantic information during scene perception.
• To compare how young and older adults utilize semantic and visual cues for attention.

Main Methods:

• Eye movements of younger (18-24) and older (66-82) adults were tracked while they described scenes.
• Semantic informativeness was rated using meaning maps; visual saliency was measured using graph-based saliency.
• Logistic mixed-effects modeling analyzed fixated locations, controlling for center bias.

Main Results:

• Both semantic informativeness and visual saliency predicted fixated locations.
• Semantic informativeness explained more unique variance than visual saliency.
• Older adults fixated fewer informative locations than younger adults, but their fixations were still well-guided by informativeness.

Conclusions:

• Young and older adults both employ semantic information to guide visual attention in scenes.
• Older adults do not universally overrely on semantic information for scene perception.
• Attention allocation strategies in older adults remain effective, though nuanced differences exist.