The effect of aging on the spatial frequency selectivity of the human visual system

Changes in the physiological properties of senescent V1 neurons suggest that the mechanisms encoding spatial frequency in primate cortex may become more broadly tuned in old age (Zhang et al., European Journal of Neuroscience, 2008, 28, 201–207). We examined this possibility in two psychophysical experiments that used masking to estimate the bandwidth of spatial frequency-selective mechanisms in younger (age ≈22 years) and older (age ≈65 years) human adults. Contrary to predictions from physiological studies, in both experiments, the spatial frequency selectivity of masking was essentially identical in younger and older subjects.