Older people appear to be better and faster at grasping “the big picture” than their younger counterparts, giving a poke in the eye to notions that seniors are slower and less adept at tasks, a study suggests.
Using patterns of bars on a computer screen, researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton monitored how much time older and younger people needed to process information about which direction the bars were moving.
When the bars were small or low in contrast (light grey versus dark grey), younger people took less time to see the direction of motion. But when the bars were large and high in contrast (black on white) older subjects outperformed their junior counterparts.
Allison Sekuler, a professor of psychology at McMaster and a senior author of the study, said research shows young brains are great at tuning into fine visual detail, but are less able to discern larger, overall patterns.
“The young brain says, ‘Well that's just background, and I don't care. I'm looking for objects out in the world,'” she said Thursday from Hamilton. “Older people actually performed better in that they needed less time to see the stimulus to perform the task than young people did.”
So what does this mean in the real world?
“There are some situations where older people would do better,” said Dr. Sekuler. “So, for instance, if you're watching a hockey game, older people might not be as good at following the movement of an individual player, but they should be able to pick up the flow of the whole team, what's happening on the ice as a whole.”
At the supermarket, seniors should be better at judging the overall quality of a steak, but may have difficulty figuring out which is the best steak of the lot, she said.
Driving is another area where young people and seniors part ways. Because older people are poorer at picking up details and dealing with competing images — the traffic ahead and a pedestrian darting into the road — driving can become more and more difficult.
But Dr. Sekuler said studies done at McMaster and elsewhere have shown that people's brains can be reprogrammed and retrained.
“So can we train older people to divide their attention as well as younger people? You can.”
The study, published in this week's issue of the journal Neuron, offers a positive message to seniors, she said. “Despite what they may think or what they may have been told, not everything is getting worse.
“I think there are trade-offs in life. One way to think about what's happening in the older brain is that although they may be losing the ability to focus in on the individual details, they may be gaining the ability to see the big picture a bit better.”
As well, she said young and middle-aged people need to stop underestimating what older people are capable of doing ... “and don't assume just because someone has grey hair that they're not going to be able to perform a task.”
The study looked at 34 young adults with an average age in the early 20s and at 31 seniors with an average age in the late 60s. Further research will look at what brain chemical may be responsible for changes in visual perception as people age. That could lead to a drug or other therapy that could improve visual perception, Dr. Sekuler said.
In an accompanying commentary in Neuron, researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville call the McMaster findings “good news” for older people and say it's another piece to the puzzle of how to help seniors see better for longer.
“We can all hope that this line of research will eventually yield treatment options for some of the problems that await us in old age,” wrote Duje Tadin and Randolph Blake of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center
