The purpose of this research is to examine the influence of aging upon the development and enactment of automatic and effortful attentional processes. The purpose is accomplished through controlled laboratory studies. Previous research in this laboratory, investigating the development of automatic visual detection in young, middle-aged extensive practice. An additional series of experiments established that the older adults, failure to development automatic detection was not due to the nature of the items to be detected, insufficient practice, the practice schedule, or response competition. Automatic detection is viewed as the project will be an examination of the extent to which old adults can go beyond the first level of learning, i.e., """"""""associative"""""""" learning, to priority learning which establishes a direct and immediate responses of the to priority learning which establishes a direct and immediate response of the attentional system to the item to be detected. The significance of this project lies in mapping out and accounting for maturational changes in the development of automatic visual detection which plays such an important part in our daily lives.
