Vision in Noise
Investigators: Cris Rabaglia and Bruce Schneider,
University of Toronto, Mississauga
This project consists of three related experiments investigating letter recognition performance in older and younger adults. In these experiments, participants are asked to identify a letter presented concurrently with different types of visual “noise” that serves as a “masker” to the target letter. Participants will see several types of this visual masking noise, including other letters and several visual transforms retaining contrast or spatial, but not semantic, information from these letter maskers. In a series of experiments, we take this general approach to investigate the relative influence of these types of visual noise on letter recognition for older and younger age groups. Among these different types of noise, participants will be asked to identify target letters of different contrast levels (Experiment 1), at different speeds (Experiment 2) and with different amounts of possible overlap between the target and the masking visual noise (Experiment 3). In the Experiment 1, we are interested in the relative difficulty of the different types of visual noise, or the amount that different types of visual noise may influence performance, and how this may differ between older and younger adults. In the Experiment 2, we are interested in if differences in perceptual or processing speed between older and younger adults may influence performance or the relative difficulty of these visual conditions. Finally, Experiment 3 seeks to determine to what extent the between-age-group differences in the relative difficulty of these different viewing conditions may be accounted for by reduced spatio-temporal resolution in older adults, resulting in increased masking from concurrent visual noise. The results of these experiments will help identify what factors may make visual object recognition more difficult for older adults, as well as what visual factors may contribute to apparent semantic inhibition difficulties in aging populations.
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