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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2009 Mar 12.
Published in final edited form as: Psychol Aging. 2008 Mar;23(1):181–189. doi: 10.1037/0882-7974.23.1.181

Figure 3.

Figure 3

Representative staircase records from the luminance contrast (LUM) and the temporal structure (TS) tasks. Each record shows trial-by-trial variations in the stimulus dimension distinguishing figure from background. a. Staircase records from one young adult and one older adult on the LUM task. The ordinate plots LUM of the figure relative to the background—the task is more difficult when LUM values are smaller, which is why the staircase starts at high contrast values and descends to contrast values over trials. b. Staircase records from one young adult and two older adults on the TS tasks. The two staircases for the older adults show the two extremes in performance among the population of older observers. The ordinate plots the correlation in TS between figure and background elements—the task is more difficult when correlation is high (i.e., figure and background TS are more similar), which is why the staircase starts at low correlation values and ascends to higher values over trials.