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, and old adults, found old adults unable to attain automatic detection after extensive practice. An additional series of experiments established that the older adults' failure to develop 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 result of a second level of learning, """"""""priority"""""""" learning. The future course of this 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 response of the attentional system to the item to be detected. The significance of this project lies in mapping out and accounting for matura-ional changes in the development of automatic visual detection which plays such an important part in our daily lives.
