Habitual Attention in Older and Young Adults Yuhong V. Jiang, Wilma Koutstaal, and Emily L. Twedell University of Minnesota Age-related decline is pervasive in tasks that require explicit learning and memory, but such reduced function is not universally observed in tasks involving incidental learning. It is unknown if habitual attention, involving incidental probabilistic learning, is preserved in older adults. Previous research on habitual attention investigated contextual cuing in young and older adults, yet contextual cuing relies not only on spatial attention but also on context processing. Here we isolated habitual attention from context processing in young and older adults. Using a challenging visual search task in which the probability of finding targets was greater in 1 of 4 visual quadrants in all contexts, we examined the acquisition, persistence, and spatial-reference frame of habitual attention. Although older adults showed slower visual search times and steeper search slopes (more time per additional item in the search display), like young adults they rapidly acquired a strong, persistent search habit toward the high-probability quadrant. In addition, habitual attention was strongly viewer-centered in both young and older adults. The demon- stration of preserved viewer-centered habitual attention in older adults suggests that it may be used to counter declines in controlled attention. This, in turn, suggests the importance, for older adults, of maintaining habit-related spatial arrangements. Keywords: habitual attention, visual search, spatial-reference frame Cognitive decline is a significant deterrence to sustaining qual- ity of life in older adults. Functions that rely most heavily on the prefrontal cortex, such as attention, working memory, and cogni- tive control, show the clearest signs of impairment with aging (Braver & Barch, 2002; Salthouse, 2012). Impairments in attention are frequently found when comparing older and young adults on difficult visual search tasks, such as finding a letter T among letter Ls (e.g., Müller-Oehring, Schulte, Rohlfing, Pfefferbaum, & Sul- livan, 2013; Potter, Grealy, Elliott, & Andrés, 2012). Compared with young adults, older adults are slower, particularly when task complexity and distraction are increased (Madden et al., 2014; Potter et al., 2012). Such age-related decline in attention and frontal function is associated with a reduction in white-matter integrity (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2007; Bennett, Motes, Rao, & Rypma, 2012) and increased compensatory neural activity in the frontal and parietal cortices (Reuter-Lorenz & Park, 2010). Given the central role of attention in many daily activities such as driving, reading, and grocery shopping, what mechanisms might older adults use to compensate for declining attentional functions? Previous research suggests that one type of attention, habitual attention, may be preserved in older adults. Such preservation may allow older adults to efficiently allocate visuospatial attention, especially in environments that support a consistent search habit. This idea stems from the finding that older adults may have a preserved ability to acquire contextual cuing. In studies of contex- tual cuing, participants search for a target T presented among L distractors. Unbeknownst to the participants, some of the search displays occasionally repeat whereas others are new. Young adults are typically faster finding the target on repeated displays than on new ones, suggesting that they can use the spatial layout to cue attention to the associated target location (Chun & Jiang, 1998). Using this paradigm, several studies found that contextual cuing is preserved in healthy older adults (Howard, Howard, Dennis, Yank- ovich, & Vaidya, 2004; Lyon, Scialfa, Cordazzo, & Bubric, 2014). Similar results were found when testing older and young adults in a matrix scanning task (Schmitter-Edgecombe & Nissley, 2002). Because repeatedly searching within the same display facilitates visual search, contextual cuing may be considered an index of habitual attention. However, not all studies using contextual cuing-like paradigms have supported the view that incidentally learned spatial attention was intact in older adults. Rabbitt (1982, as cited in Lyon et al., 2014) found that older adults were less capable of using neigh- boring distractors to cue the target’s location. In addition, older adults in one study failed to acquire contextual cuing, suggesting that aging may impair habitual attention (Smyth & Shanks, 2011). A possible reason for conflicting findings is that contextual cuing is a complex experimental paradigm that relies on multiple cognitive and brain processes. In contextual cuing, particular mul- tielement arrays of distractors are repeatedly presented, and the location of the target is predictable based on the specific spatial configuration of the distractors in these repeated arrays. Thus, contextual cuing depends on at least two mechanisms: processing the repeated spatial context, and deploying attention to the specific This article was published Online First November 10, 2016. Yuhong V. Jiang, Wilma Koutstaal, and Emily L. Twedell, Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota. This study was supported by the Engdahl Family Research Fund. We thank all our participants for volunteering in our study, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and the University of Minnesota Retiree Volunteer’s Center for help with recruiting participants. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yuhong V. Jiang, Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, 75 East River Road, S251 Elliott Hall, Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-mail: jiang 166@umn.edu This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Psychology and Aging © 2016 American Psychological Association 2016, Vol. 31, No. 8, 970 –980 0882-7974/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pag0000139 970