Age-related decline in extrafoveal letter perception.

Peripheral vision is constricted in elderly adults. Experiment 1 showed that the age deficit in letter recognition time increased as the target moved off the fovea. Experiment 2 showed a corresponding reduction in angular threshold. Thus, the outer elements in a multicharacter display are seen with greater difficulty or not at all by the elderly adult. Experiment 3 showed this restricted field protected elderly adults from eccentric distractors, as found by Wright and Elias (1979). At the same time, elderly adults showed more, not less, interference on foils matched on discriminability with younger adults, in keeping with the larger literature on age and noise. Similar perceptual limitations may confound other array-processing experiments.