Abstract
It has been shown that the detection and discrimination of motion from
random-dot kinematograms deteriorates with age. In addition to such
low-level motion perception tasks, also the processing of more higher
level motion stimuli, such as biological motion, changes with age;
more specifically, it has been suggested that older adults rely more
on the global form than the local motion information when processing
point-light walkers (Pilz et al., 2010, Vision Research). Here, we
investigated how the processing of local motion and form information
in biological motion stimuli is related to sensitivity to coherent
motion in healthy ageing. In a first task, we asked younger (18-32
years) and older participants (>60 years) to indicate the facing
direction of three different point-light actions; normal actions that
contained local motion and global form information, scrambled actions
that contained primarily local motion information, and random-position
actions that contained primarily global form information. In
accordance with previous results, we found a general age-effect in
that older adults performed worse than younger adults in all
conditions. However, younger adults performed worse for
random-position than normal actions, whereas older adults showed the
same level of performance. Both age-groups performed worse for
scrambled actions. In a second task, participants had to discriminate
left/right (horizontal), or up/down (vertical) motion using random-dot
kinematograms. We determined motion coherence thresholds for each
participant using the method of constant stimuli with stimulus
coherences varying between 1% and 80%. We found that overall, motion
coherence was higher for vertical than horizontal motion but there was
no difference in performance between age-groups. In addition,
coherence thresholds did not correlate with performance in the
biological motion task.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Event | PSYPAG 2015 Annual Postgraduate Student Conference - Glasgow, United Kingdom Duration: 22 Jul 2015 → 24 Jul 2015 |
Conference
Conference | PSYPAG 2015 Annual Postgraduate Student Conference |
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Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
City | Glasgow |
Period | 22/07/15 → 24/07/15 |