Reflexive orienting in response to short- and long-duration gaze cues in young, young-old, and old-old adults.

Shifting visual focus on the basis of the perceived gaze direction of another person is one form of joint attention. In the present study, we investigated whether this socially relevant form of orienting is reflexive and whether it is influenced by age. Green and Woldorff (Cognition 122:96-101, 2012) argued that rapid cueing effects (i.

Spatial distribution of attentional inhibition is not altered in healthy aging.

Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon of attentional orienting that is indexed by slower responses to targets presented at previously attended locations. The purpose of this study was to examine adult age differences in the distribution of IOR to multiple locations. In three experiments, young adults (ages 18-30 years) and older adults (ages 60-87 years) completed an IOR task that varied in the number of simultaneous onset cues (one to seven) and the number of display locations (four or eight).

Adult age differences in attention to semantic context.

In three experiments age differences in attention to semantic context were examined. The performance of younger adults (ages 18-29 years) and older adults (ages 60-79 years) on a semantic priming task indicated that both age groups could use information regarding the probability that a prime and target would be related to flexibly anticipate the target category given the prime word (Experiment 1). The timing by which target expectancies were reflected in reaction time performance was delayed for older adults as compared to younger adults, but only when the target was expected to be semantically unrelated to the prime word (Experiment 2).