Young and older adults performed a visual error detection task in two experiments. In Experiment 1, errors and anomalies were embedded in large, complex visual scenes, and participants were to find them and describe the nature of the identified problems. Young adults found more errors than older adults, a finding unrelated to age differences in near visual acuity or time constraints. Experiment 2 replicated the age difference in error detection using simplified visual scenes containing fewer errors. Results are interpreted as reflecting older adults' decreased ability to form representations for novel information, even though the task did not require the creation of new episodic memories. 1. Aging and the Detection of Visual Errors in Scenes Relatively little research to date has tested age-related changes in error detection. Among the existing studies, some have examined young and older individuals’ abilities to identify errors that they committed themselves (e.g., [1–3]). While these studies provide very naturalistic tests of error detection, interpretation of the results is complicated because there are often age differences in error production. Other studies have tested the effects of aging on the detection of experimenter-provided errors in written language. Zabrucky and Moore [4] found no age differences in detecting different types of errors in text (including nonsense words, false information, and inconsistent information). Shafto [5] found that spelling errors in text were detected equally often by young and older adults, but that older adults were impaired relative to young adults in detecting errors of meaning (e.g., the word “sun” where the word “moon” is actually appropriate), apparently because the semantic context leads to miscomprehension of the presented word. MacKay et al. [6] found equivalent performance for young and older adults on a task requiring the detection of misspelled words. Shafto [7] demonstrated that older adults actually outperformed young adults on misspelling detection, a finding driven by older adults’ better ability to identify erroneous spellings of low-frequency items. Such tasks tap language processes, and it is not clear whether preserved error detection per se or language comprehension processes (which have been shown to be relatively stable in older adulthood; see, e.g., [8, 9]) account for the findings. Additional research has tested the detection of errors or anomalies introduced by an experimenter using nonlinguistic stimuli. Simons and Levin [10] tested “change blindness” by measuring how likely an observer
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