Aging and the visual perception of rigid and nonrigid motion

Nonrigid forms of motion are commonplace in everyday life. Given previously documented age-related deteriorations in various tasks involving motion (discriminating speed, identifying motion direction, etc.), an experiment was conducted to evaluate the potential effect of age upon the visual ability to detect rigid and nonrigid object motion. Thirty younger and older observers participated in the experiment (mean ages were 19.9 and 75.8 years, respectively). As has been done multiple times in the past, the individual motions of object vertices were manipulated to simulate either rigid motion (rotation in depth, with or without precession) or two different types of nonrigid motion (also rotation in depth with or without precession, but with added object deformation). In confirmation of previous research, there were large effects of nonrigid motion type and precession upon the ability to differentiate between rigid and nonrigid object motion. There was also a large effect of age, such that the discrimination performance of the younger observers was 49.6% higher than that exhibited by the older observers. In this first ever study of aging and nonrigid object motion perception, we thus find that aging is associated with a substantial impairment in the ability to visually perceive object nonrigidity.