Aging - Influence of visual

Question 1

Allen, Bucur, Work, & Madden, 2011

Answer 1

• In a word-naming study that varied orthographic encoding (case type), lexical access (word frequency) and phonological regularity (regular vs. irregular), older adults showed larger case-mixing effects than younger adults, but no difference in lexical access or phonological regularity effects. Lexical access skills remain stable in orthographic/semantic and phonological routes, but they may take longer due to the need to clean up noisy perceptual information

Question 2

Madden, 1988

Answer 2

• Differential slowing of feature extraction (age difference greater for degraded targets (* between each letter)) in visual word recognition tasks (Madden, 1988) - mediated by increased use of semantic information

Question 3

Madden, 1992

Answer 3

• The degree of age-related slowing in a visual word identification task was greater for degraded stimuli than intact (additional 10ms per year) (Madden, 1992) - although age-effects were not completely removed when accounting for visual acuity, and some aspects of visual word recognition involved in semantic activation relatively exempt from aging effects