The proposed investigation employs eye movement technology to study age differences in reading. Increased knowledge about age differences in reading and reading comprehension will be critical for improving older adults' understanding of important and often complex materials such as written medical information and instructions, treatment plans, informed consent forms, insurance forms, and other similar materials. Eye movement technology has proven to be important for studying group and individual differences in reading processes because eye movements are especially sensitive to cognitive factors affecting reading. We propose to use variations on the reading with distraction paradigm (Connelly, Hasher, & Zacks, 1991) to compare young and older adults' pattern of eye movements while reading texts with interposed distracting words and phrases. Although not a typical reading task, this method is useful as a way to test how reading and comprehension are affected by factors influencing the allocation of attention. Older adults typically read texts more slowly than young adults and have poorer comprehension of what they have read. In an effort to explain these differences, we combine the predictions of the inhibitory deficit theory (Hasher & Zacks, 1988), encoding deficit theory (Craik & Byrd, 1985), and Craik's (e.g., 1986) notions of environmental support. Six experiments are proposed to test inhibition and encoding accounts of age differences in reading and reading comprehension. We vary distracter salience, distracter length (number of words), semantic relation of distracter to target passage, distracter meaningfulness, and predictability of distracter location, in both sentence and text passages. Findings from these studies will permit a more complete account of age differences and a refinement of the inhibitory deficit hypothesis, and lead to a greater understanding of the processes underlying age differences in reading.
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