Aging modulates the effects of scene complexity on visual search in naturalistic virtual environments

Processing task-relevant visual information is important for many everyday tasks. Prior work demonstrated that older adults are more susceptible to distraction by salient task-irrelevant stimuli, leading to less efficient visual search. However, these studies often used simple stimuli, and less is known about how aging influences visual attention in environments more representative of real-world complexity. Here, we test the hypothesis that aging impacts how the visual complexity of the environment influences visual search. Young and older adults completed a virtual reality-based visual search task in environments with increasing visual complexity. As visual complexity increased, all participants exhibited longer times to complete the task which resulted from increased time transferring gaze from one correct target to the next and increased delay between when correct targets were fixated and selected. The increase in time to completion can also be attributed to longer times spent re-fixating task-relevant objects and fixating task-irrelevant objects. These changes in visual search and target selection with increasing visual complexity were greater in older adults and working memory capacity was associated with multiple performance measures in the visual search task. These findings suggest that visual search performance could be integrated into assessments of working memory in dynamic environments.