Developmental Psychology · Jun 13, 2019

No evidence for a common factor underlying visual abilities in healthy older people

By Shaqiri A, Pilz KS, Cretenoud AF et al.

The world's population is aging at an increasing rate. Even in the absence of neurodegenerative disorders, healthy aging affects perception and cognition. In the context of cognition, common factors are well established. Much less is known about common factors for vision. Here, we tested 92 healthy older and 104 healthy younger participants in 19 visual tests (including visual search and contrast sensitivity) and three cognitive tests (including verbal fluency and digit span). Unsurprisingly, younger participants performed better than older participants in almost all tests. Surprisingly, however, the performance of older participants was mostly uncorrelated between visual tests, and we found no evidence for a common factor. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

doi.org/10.1037/dev0000740Open accessPubMed 31192641Mechanisms