Age-related differences in the lexical priming effect can be predominantly attributed to differences in response bias

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human Aging
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Age-related visual declines impair object identification in challenging environments.
• Older adults may over-rely on context, leading to
• false seeing
• - perceiving expected objects not present.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate whether
• false seeing
• in older adults stems from context reliance or perceptual deficits.
• Examine lexical priming effects to differentiate response bias from perceptual sensitivity.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments used a two-alternative, forced-choice paradigm with younger and older adults.
• Visually degraded target words were preceded by identical, semantically related, or unrelated primes.
• Signal detection theory (SDT) analyzed perceptual sensitivity (d") and response bias (c).

Main Results:

• After controlling for perceptual differences, age-related target identification differences were examined.
• When primes were unrelated to targets, performance differences between age groups were eliminated.
• In related priming conditions, age-related differences were primarily due to response bias, not perceptual sensitivity.

Conclusions:

• Age-related
• false seeing
• is mainly driven by an increased tendency to rely on contextual information (response bias).
• Perceptual sensitivity differences do not fully explain why older adults report expected but absent objects.