The Influence of Aging on Perceptual Grouping in Haptic Search

Abstract

Perceptual grouping speeds up haptic search. This has particularly been shown for grouping of distractors by similarity and good continuation [1]. Here, we investigated the effect of aging on grouping in haptic search. We reasoned that because older adults have less cognitive resources available for processing perceptual information, they would benefit more from grouping as compared to younger adults. We tested this hypothesis in a haptic search task in which proximity, similarity and good continuation of the distractors were manipulated. We found that older adults indeed show a larger effect of distractor similarity on search times as compared to younger adults, where similar dis- tractors were processed faster than dissimilar distractors. However, older adults showed an opposite effect of grouping by proximity, where items that were further apart were processed faster. This may be caused by a strong bowed spatial position effect in older adults: stimuli that are closer to each other are more difficult to discriminate. We conclude that haptic perceptual grouping by similarity has larger benefits in elderly as compared to younger adults.