Aging and Top-Down Attentional Control in Visual Search

Many visual tasks, such as airport baggage screening, rely heavily on the ability to accurately and efficiently search for and detect target items amongst distractors. For example, in a luggage X-ray, a weapon such as a knife must be discriminated from visually similar items (McCarley, Kramer, Wickens, Vidoni, & Boot, 2004). It is critical to the mission of the Human Factors/Behavior Sciences Division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to be able to assess and maintain this skill set in those employed as baggage screeners. Basic and applied research in visual search has yielded an extensive body of knowledge regarding the humanand task-dependent variables contributing to search performance. In particular, previous research suggests that the efficiency of visual search varies significantly as a function of increasing adult age. With increasing age, elementary sensory/motor performance (i.e., “bottom-up” processing) declines, whereas reliance on experience and knowledge of taskrelevant goals (i.e., “top-down” attention) tends to increase.

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