Young and Older Adults' Reading of Distracters

Abstract

Eye-tracking technology was employed to examine young and older adults' performance in the reading with distraction paradigm. Distracters of 1, 2, and 4 words that formed meaningful phrases were used. There were marked age differences in fixation patterns. Young adults' fixations to the distracters and targets increased with distracter length. This suggests that they were attempting to integrate the distracters with the sentence and had more and more difficulty doing so as the distracters increased in length. Young adults did have better comprehension of the sentences than older adults, and they also had better recognition memory for target words and distracters.

This research was supported by grant RO1AG09952 from the National Institute on Aging and by grants from the NIH to the University of Kansas through the Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, grant number P30 HD-002528, and the Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communication Disorders, grant number P30 DC-005803.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kim Metcalf

Metcalf is now at the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Chiung-Ju Liu

Liu is now at the School of Public Health, Boston University