Age and Skill in Visual Search.

The effects of age and experience on visual-cognitive performance were examined by administering a domain-relevant visual search task and a standard letter search task to skilled and control subjects at 2 age levels (young and middle-aged adults). In the skilled task, subjects searched for a designated item within 3-item displays using images of bacteria morphology as targets and distractors. Each target was preceded by a word prime representative of bacteria morphology that was valid, invalid, or neutral with respect to the diagnostic characteristics of the target