Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Psychology and Aging

Publication Date

6-1-2017

Abstract

© 2017 The Author(s). Words are recognized most efficiently by young adults when fixated at an optimal viewing position (OVP), which for English is between a word's beginning and middle letters. How this OVP effect changes with age is unknown but may differ for older adults due to visual declines in later life. Accordingly, a lexical decision experiment was conducted in which short (5-letter) and long (9-letter) words were fixated at various letter positions. The older adults produced slower responses. But, crucially, effects of fixation location for each word-length did not differ substantially across age groups, indicating that OVP effects are preserved in older age.

ISSN

0882-7974

Publisher

American Psychological Association Inc.

Volume

32

Issue

4

First Page

367

Last Page

376

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

Aging, Optimal viewing position, Visual word recognition

Scopus ID

85017406346

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Hybrid: This publication is openly available in a subscription-based journal/series

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