A new study from Bar-Ilan University found that foveal crowding — difficulty identifying a letter surrounded by visual clutter — increases significantly with age, but only when viewing time is limited to 120 milliseconds. Thirty-three participants aged 20–89 completed a letter recognition task under unlimited and brief presentation conditions. Younger adults showed negligible crowding effects in both conditions. Older adults performed similarly to younger adults when given unlimited time, but suffered pronounced accuracy declines under the 120ms condition. Reaction times also grew longer with age even in unlimited viewing. These findings suggest age-related declines in visual processing speed, not visual acuity per se, are the key driver of real-world visual difficulties that older adults commonly report.
