Searching beyond decrements: Attentional guidance across the adult lifespan

Visual search depends on attentional priority, shaped by stimulus salience, current goals, and prior experiences. Although overall search performance declines with age, it remains unclear to what extent this reflects impaired attentional guidance rather than other age-related changes. In this review article, we evaluate how each source of guidance operates across adulthood. Once perceptual factors and general slowing are accounted for, experience-based guidance is largely preserved across timescales, from intertrial priming to lifetime knowledge. Guidance by stable goals and physical salience is also broadly intact. However, specific age-related changes emerge: the influence of past experiences increases under demanding conditions, and goal-directed attention becomes less efficient when priorities must be rapidly reconfigured, pointing to difficulty in resolving conflicts between past and present priorities.