Aging and the inhibition of competing hypotheses during visual word identification: evidence from the progressive demasking task
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two experiments used the progressive demasking (PD) task to examine age differences in the ability to inhibit higher frequency competitors during the process of identifying a visually degraded word. In Experiment 1, older adults exhibited a larger inhibitory neighborhood frequency effect (i.e., slower identification of words with many higher frequency competitors) than younger adults, but additional analyses indicated that this difference could be explained by general slowing rather than a deficit in inhibitory abilities. In Experiment 2, a primed version of the PD task was used to promote hypothesis testing by semantically priming the target word (e.g., cry-weep) or a higher frequency competitor of the target (e.g, day-weep) prior to the onset of the demasking sequence. Although older adults were more likely to make identification errors consistent with an inhibitory deficit (e.g., identifying weep as week), these errors were infrequent overall and there was no corresponding evidence of a larger interference effect in the older adults' identification latencies. Taken together, performance in these two tasks provides little evidence of reduced inhibitory functioning in older adults. The implications for the inhibitory deficit hypothesis of cognitive aging and directions for future are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".