Age-related preservation of top-down attentional guidance during visual search

Younger (19–27 years of age) and older (60–82 years of age) adults performed a letter search task in which a color singleton was either noninformative (baseline condition) or highly informative (guided condition) regarding target location. In the guided condition, both age groups exhibited a substantial decrease in response time (RT) to singleton targets, relative to the baseline condition, as well as an increase in RT to nonsingleton targets. The authors conclude that under conditions that equate the physical structure of individual displays, top-down attentional guidance can be at least as effective for older adults as for younger adults. The distinction between bottom-up and top-down forms of attentional control is prominent in current theories of visual search performance (Wolfe, 1998; Wolfe, Butcher, Lee, & Hyle, 2003; Yantis, 1998). A paradigmatic form of bottom-up attention is the involuntary orienting to a target item distinguished from nontarget (distractor) items on the basis of local salience of display proper-ties (e.g., a red target letter among gray distractor letters). In top-down processing, in contrast, search is driven more by th