Elissa Aminoff¹, Bernadine Gurning; ¹Fordham University

Visual perception undergoes dynamic changes throughout the lifespan, in part due to changes in brain development. As individuals age, the category specific organization of the ventral visual stream becomes less specific – a process known as dedifferentiation. This study examined how this might affect older adults’ scene perception. We predict that as one ages, the focus of scene perception may shift more towards the semantic and content aspects of a scene – processing that typically occurs in more anterior areas of the ventral stream. In contrast, younger adults may process more spatial aspects of the scene, which may rely more on category specific scene processing, and more posterior areas of the ventral stream. To test this, both older and younger participants viewed scenes and described them as accurately and descriptively as possible. Their responses were then coded and scored along three dimensions: level of detail, semantic information, and spatial information. Each response was scored by two reviewers whose ratings showed strong inter-rater reliability (ICC = 0.8-0.9). Results demonstrated that, critically, the level of detail matched across both age groups, and thus, a similar level of specificity in scene perception was observed. However, a significant interaction was found between groups and the spatial and semantic information included in the responses (p < .03). Older adults focused more on semantic information. In comparison, younger adults focused more on spatial information. We suggest that this pattern of results indicates not a decline in scene perception as one ages, as demonstrated by the equal amount of detail, but rather a shift in strategy that may be triggered by changes in the ventral stream's dedifferentiation.