When we look out at the world, we see a world filled with environmental objects. Increases in age systematically affect the ability of older adults to detect and visually perceive objects defined by common fate. The individual older participants’ object detection accuracies were highly correlated with their individual chronological ages, such that the performance of the younger old participants was much higher than that exhibited by the older old. The older and younger adults were similarly affected by variations in the number of target dots and the target interpoint spacing. The younger adults outperformed the older adults by 19.4 percent in Experiment 1 and 50.5 percent in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, the number of dots defining the target was varied, while in Experiment 2, the target interpoint spacing was varied. On any given trial, the participants sequentially viewed two apparent motion sequences and were required to indicate which temporal interval contained a coherently moving dotted line embedded in noisy random background motion. Twenty-two younger and older adults (mean ages were 23.4 and 74.7 years, respectively) participated in two experiments. In this study, the effect of aging upon the ability to utilize common fate was evaluated. Grouping by common fate plays an important role in how human observers perceive environmental objects.
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