Host: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
Although the visual search task is one of the most frequently used tasks in psychological labs, it is not the same as visual search in everyday activity, in which people look at meaningful materials, and pick up the target from lots of different dummies. We made up a daily-life-type visual search task, in which participants looking for a book from a bookshelf, and investigate effects of two types of clue, categorical and experiential probabilistic clues, comparing those effects between different age groups and with/without time pressures. Results showed that both clues were facilitative for younger adults; in contrasts, for older adults (65 years up) under the time pressure condition, categorical clues had interfering effects with non-matched category, maybe because that older adults could not abandon their expectancies delivered from the clue. Relation between cognitive control by external cues and aging will be discussed.
