# Ageing modulates the effects of scene complexity on visual search and target selection in virtual environments

## TL;DR

Older adults struggle more with visual search in complex environments, showing slower performance and more distractions compared to younger adults.

## Contribution

The study reveals how visual complexity affects visual search differently in older versus younger adults in virtual environments.

## Key findings

- Increased visual complexity led to longer task completion times for all participants.
- Older adults showed greater difficulty with gaze transfer and target selection in complex environments.
- Working memory capacity was linked to visual search performance in dynamic settings.

## Abstract

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 ageing influences visual attention in environments more representative of real-world complexity. Here, we test the hypothesis that ageing 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.