AGING, SKILL, AND KNOWLEDGE USE

尽管众所周知，视觉信息的许多方面 随着年龄的增长，加工呈下降趋势，这一点很重要 侧重于确定与以下因素相关的机制的研究 成年后视觉信息处理能力的保留 好几年了。拟议研究的理论框架坚持 专业的视觉处理性能依赖于有效的使用 与领域相关的视觉知识。这些建议研究的目的是 为了检验两种注意机制，搜索效率和启动， 被认为是在所选技能中使用视觉知识的基础 域。搜索效率将注意力限制在关键 信息，以及启动机制用来使关键信息 更清晰，或更快或更完整的编码。有人建议， 复杂视觉任务中信息选择的注意要求 是不同的，这取决于观察者先前的领域相关 知识。在以下情况下应遵守与年龄相关的正常限制 项目级别的视觉信息不容易提取。然而，这样的 不应对具有专门技能的个人遵守限制 中包含关键信息的项目级单位的知识 选定的域。这八项拟议的实验旨在 通过比较医疗系统的性能来测试这些预测 不同年龄的实验室技术人员(年轻、中年、年长 成人)在一系列与领域相关的视觉搜索上具有匹配的对照 任务。建议研究的刺激材料包括克 染色显微照片作为显示字段，并提供诊断信息 作为靶标和探针的细胞类型和感知上可比的项目。这个 预计拟议的研究将表明，年龄较大的熟练受试者使用 特定领域的知识，以保持快速/准确的视觉信息 处理性能。

Although it is well established that many aspects of visual information processing show decline with advancing age, it is important to conduct research that focuses on identifying the mechanisms associated with preserved visual information processing performance during the adult years. The theoretical framework of the proposed research maintains that expert visual processing performance depends on the efficient use of domain-relevant visual knowledge. The aim of the prop6sed studies is to examine two attentional mechanisms, search efficiency and priming, that are assumed to underlie visual knowledge use in the selected skill domain. Search efficiency acts to confine attention to critical information, and priming mechanisms serve to make critical information more clear, or more quickly or completely encoded. It is suggested that the attentional demands of information selection in complex visual tasks are different, depending on the observer's prior domain-relevant knowledge. Normal age-related limitations should be observed when item-level visual information is not easily extracted. However, such limitations should not be observed for individuals who have specialized knowledge of the item-level units that comprise critical information in the selected domain. The eight proposed experiments are designed to test these predictions by comparing the performance of medical laboratory technologists varying in age (young, middle-aged, older adults) with matched controls on a range of domain-related visual search tasks. Stimulus materials for the proposed studies consist of gram stain photomicrographs as display fields, and diagnostically informative cell types and perceptually comparable items as targets and probes. The proposed research is expected to show that older skilled subjects use domain-specific knowledge to maintain fast/accurate visual information processing performance.