BY CHAD TABLER
In reading Age-Related Differences in Perceptual Learning in the psychological journal, Human Factors: 1996 Vol. 38(3) Sep, p. 417-424, I discovered much about how older and younger adults differ in perceptual learning. I chose this article because it has implications on employee performance which ties into what I wish to do in my career, something with a little psychology, and a little business. Anyway, the areas of automatic attention response (AAR), prepractice as a developmental tool in perceptual skill, and distractibility rates were measured through empirical experiments. The authors, D. Kristen Gilbert and Wendy A. Rogers, did not specify as to how old the "older adults" group was nor how young the "young adults" group was. Since the article's purpose was to measure perceptual differences between the two groups to see which group had more desired perceptual characteristics for a working environment (such as in an office, a desk job was the impression I got), this caused me to assume that the young adults were probably ranging from age 24 to 35 or so and the older adults maybe from 50 to 65.
Several experiments underwent and the results were interesting. In one that controlled for AAR, researchers found older subjects incapable of learning or responding in AAR, whereas the young adults almost always responded to sensory information this way. But, in another experiment, scientists discovered that young people are more easily distracted because their AAR causes them to respond often to things that do not relate to their job, thus slowing their work level down. Prepractice helped both the young and old to improve their task performance skills, and the researchers concluded that an old employee who prepracticed a certain task will always be faster at performing that task than an old employee who has not prepracticed it.
REFERENCE
Gilbert, D. G., & Rogers, W. A., Age-Related Differences in Perceptual Learning, Human Factors: 1996 Vol. 38(3) Sep, p. 417-424.