Tomatoes and Apples or Red and Green Lines: Are Age-Related Interference Effects Based on Competition Among Concepts or Percepts?

Abstract

Using a negative priming paradigm, the authors tested whether age-related interference effects are due to age differences in perceptual distractibility or in resolving conceptual competition. In samples of 40 younger adults (aged 22–34) and 40 older adults (aged 58–76), the authors found a greater reduction in processing speed for older than for younger adults in trials in which targets were superimposed with distracting objects as compared to single-target trials. When trials were paralleled for perceptual features, that is, when single-target trials were supplemented with nonsense distractors, the age effect became nonsignificant. The results suggest that age-related interference effects are primarily due to age differences in perceptual distractibility.

This research was in part funded by a grant of the German Research Foundation (DFG HA 1452/6-1). The authors would like to thank Matthias Ihrke who programmed the genetic algorithm and Hecke Schrobstorff for their helpful comments on the paper.

Notes

Note. Standard deviation in parenthesis. CO = control; NP = negative priming; ST = single target, PP = positive priming.

^a N = 40.

¹An additional analysis including PP trials did not yield different results with respect to the interaction between prime condition, distractor condition, and age group.