| Aging is a complex process,which is accompanied by the decline of various sensory and cognitive functions,and these declines are often manifested in the reading protocols as "difficult" symptoms specific to the elderly,specifically,in terms of eye movements,the reading duration and gaze duration increase,the forward saccade amplitude decreases,the number of fixations and regression count increases,and the perceptual span decreases.However,it is not clear how the decline of different functions in the elderly affects the reading process.Previous studies have also found that visual contrast is an important variable affecting visual processing and that reducing text contrast leads to difficulties in the visual stage,which are similar to the difficulties that older adults exhibit in visual aging.This study intends to delve into how aging in visual,saccade,and cognitive abilities affects the range of information that can be extracted in the reading and to discuss how stimuli quality of presented text affects readers of different ages.Experiment 1 explored the visual span of young and old people at different stimuli quality,measuring the range of information recognized by one gaze without being able to move the eye.The experiment used the trigram paradigm,where each trigram was presented randomly at different distances from the central gaze point,with the characters presented at seven locations to the left and right of the gaze point,a total of15 locations.The experiment was a mixed design of 2(age: young/old)*2(contrast:normal/faint)*15(each presentation position).The results of Experiment 1 showed that in normal contrast,the visual span of older adults was 3.1 characters,which was smaller than that of young adults at 5.8 characters.Reducing the character contrast only affected the visual span in older adults,but basically did not affect the visual span in young adults.Because the visual span in Experiment 1 was measured without being able to move the eyes and the materials were also random characters,there was a big difference with the normal reading.To explore the effects of aging during reading,Experiment 2 explored the perceptual span of young and older adults under two different tasks,searching and reading,and how it was affected by the stimuli quality.The experiment consisted of two tasks,searching and reading.The young and old participants who had participated in Experiment 1 were selected,using a moving window paradigm with eight window conditions.A mixed design of 2(age: young/old)* 2(contrast: normal/faint)* 8(each window condition)was used in both the reading and searching task.The experimental results showed that in the searching,the perceptual span of both young and old people exceeded the maximum window,7character positions in this study still interfered with the searching process.In the reading,the perceptual span of L1R2 for older adults was smaller than the perceptual span of L1R3 for youth,and stimuli quality had no effect on the perceptual span of reading for youth and older adults.The two studies concluded the following:(1)There is a tendency for the visual span to decrease due to the presence of aging in the visual ability of older adults.(2)Older adults are more sensitive to low contrast and have higher contrast thresholds.(3)The perceptual span in searching Chinese characters is greater than 7 characters,and there may be a larger preview area in Chinese as English.(4)The perceptual span of reading for young people is L1R3,while the perceptual breadth of reading for older people is L1R2,and the aging of the perceptual span is mainly manifested by the reduction of the right visual field.(5)stimuli quality did not affect the perceptual span of reading in either young or old people,and although the difficulty in extraction due to the reduced stimulus quality interfered with reading and led to an increase in the average gaze duration,readers were still able to recognize characters normally. |
PDF Full Text Request