Age-related changes in the visual, oculomotor, and cognitive mechanisms underlying reading

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Reading is a skill that is fundamentally important for individuals to actively and successfully participate in everyday life. Reading is also a complex cognitive and visual task, which necessitates the accurate programming and execution of eyemovements, rapid identification of intricate visual patterns, and swift integration of individual letters and words to build a cohesive understanding of a text. Determining how reading changes during healthy, normative older age, including in response to typical age-related changes in cognition and vision, is fundamental to efforts toensure that individuals read successfully across the lifespan.Previous research has shown that reading is slower in older adults (aged 65+ years) than young adults (aged 18-35 years) and that the eye movements of older readers differ from those of other groups of slower readers (e.g. less skilled young adult readers, readers with dyslexia). This indicates that there are distinctive age-related changes in the processes underlying reading. Multiple contributing factors to such changes have been established, including visual declines and slowdowns in the identification of words.To date the focus of research examining age-related changes in eye movement behaviour during reading has been on the "young-old", i.e. those aged 65-79 years. Relatively few "older-old" readers (aged 80+ years) have been included in previous studies, and to date no studies have sought to compare young-old and older-old readers. This is despite evidence that cognitive, visual, oculomotor, and language abilities continue to change throughout older age. Determining how the cognitive mechanisms underlying reading change during normative older-old age will provide a much more comprehensive understanding of age-related changes in reading.