Age Degradation in Top-Down Processing: Identifying Objects from Canonical and Noncanonical Viewpoints

Twenty-four young (mean age 21.8 years) and 24 old (mean age 65.2years) participants were asked to determine whether spoken words correctly named pictures of objects. Half of the objects were portrayed from noncanonical (unusual) viewpoints, and half were portrayed from canon ical viewpoints. The older participants required more time and made more errors when they evaluated the noncanonical pictures (relative to the canonical pictures) than the younger participants. This finding is consistent with previous evidence that frontal lobe function degrades with aging and with results from a positron emission tomography study (S.M. Kosslyn et al., 1994) that showed that the frontal lobes (among other areas) are activated more in the noncanonical condition than in the canonical condition.