Mechanisms of spatial contextual cueing in younger and older adults

The contextual cueing effect is the phenomenon observed when response time (RT) becomes faster in visual search in repeated context compared with a new one. In the present study, we explored whether the mechanisms involved in the effect are age dependent. We investigated it in younger (N = 20, 12 women, 21.2 +/- 1.75 years) and older (N = 19, nine women, 67.05 +/- 3.94 years) adults. We found a faster target identification in the repeated configurations with similar magnitude in the two age groups, which indicates that this contextual cueing effect remained intact even in the older participants. To shed light on the underlying mechanisms, we measured and compared the amplitude of three event-related potentials: N2pc, P3, and response-locked LRP. In the younger group, the larger contextual cueing effect (novel-minus-repeated RT difference) correlated positively with a larger difference in amplitude for repeated compared with novel configurations for both the N2pc and the P3 components, but there was no correlation with the response-locked lateralized readiness potential (rLRP) amplitude difference. However, in the older group, only the rLRP amplitude difference between novel and repeated configurations showed an enhancement with larger contextual cueing. These results suggest that different mechanisms are responsible for the contextual effect in the two age groups. It has both an early and an intermediate locus in younger adults: effective attentional allocation and successful stimulus categorization, or decision-making confidence are involved; while in older adults, a late locus was identified: a more efficient response organization led to a faster reaction.