Age and the identification of inconspicuous words

The purpose of these experiments was to examine systematically the basis for the profound inability of healthy, well-educated older subjects in earlier research to identify inconspicuous words. Two experiments were carried out in which inconspicuous words were formed of regular block letters composed in a black-on-white (Experiment 1) or a white-on-black format (Experiment 2). In both experiments the performance of the older persons was nonsignificantly below that of the younger subjects (an effect which reached significance when considered across the two experiments together). No effects were observed for contrast relationship or for a remediation of age deficits in inconspicuous word identification through interposed reversible figure training. The results suggest strongly that, for older persons, inconspicuous word identification is highly dependent upon the specific structural composition of the stimuli and is consequently explicable in terms of the already well-documented changes in perceptual function with age.