Age-related differences in the lexical priming effect can be predominantly attributed to differences in response bias

Age-related declines in visual perception challenge older adults' ability to locate and identify objects in noisy (e.g., fog, glare, inadequate lighting) or cluttered visual environments. To compensate, older adults often increase reliance on contextual information, which could be helpful, but may also lead to increased risk for "false seeing"-reporting expected objects based on contextual information rather than those actually presented-a phenomenon that Jacoby et al. (2012) observed in older adults under challenging viewing conditions. However, it remains unaddressed whether such false seeing is driven by older adults' elevated tendency to rely on context or by age-related declines in visual perceptual processes. The present study addressed this issue by examining the lexical priming effects in 18 younger and 18 older adults (M = 21.4 years; M = 76.2 years) in Experiment 1 and 13 younger and 13 older adults (M = 21.2 years; M = 74.8 years) in Experiment 2 using a two-alternative, forced-choice paradigm, while controlling for age-related perceptual differences. On each trial, participants identified a visually degraded target word preceded by an identical, semantically related, or unrelated prime. We applied signal detection theory to isolate perceptual sensitivity (d') and response bias (c). Results revealed that once stimulus parameters were adjusted to eliminate age differences in performance when the prime was unrelated to the target, age-related differences in target identification in the related priming conditions were predominantly driven by age-related differences in response bias rather than in any residual age differences in perceptual sensitivity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).