Age differences in information finding tasks: Performance and visual exploration strategy with different web page layouts

Recent research suggests that older Internet users seem to find it more difficult to locate navigation links than to find information content in web pages. One possibility is that older Internet users’ visual exploration of web pages is more linear in nature, even when this type of processing is not appropriate for the task. In the current study, the eye movements of young and older Internet users were recorded using an ecological version of the web pages or a discursive version designed to induce a linear exploration. The older adults found more targets when performing content-oriented compared to navigation-oriented searches, thus replicating previous results. Moreover, they performed less well than young people only when required to locate navigation links and tended to outperform the younger participants in content-oriented searches. Although the type of search task and type of web page resulted in different visual strategies, little or no support was found for the hypothesis that older participants explore web pages in a more linear way in cases where this strategy was not appropriate. The main conclusion is that differences in visual exploration do not seem to mediate the specific difficulty older adults experience in navigation-oriented searches in web pages.

► Eye movements were recorded in young and older Internet users. ► The type of search task and web page layout resulted in different visual strategies. ► Older users performed less well only when required to find navigation links. ► This difficulty does not result from changes in the visual processing of web pages.