Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Most research suggests that older adults experience declines in cognitive abilities, but these outcomes are often drawn fromexperimental paradigms that do not employ naturalistic materials. The present study addresses this issue by examiningolder and younger adults’ ability to detect so-called native advertisements, which are designed to seamlessly blend intotheir medium. Participants viewed either real webpages (visual) or listened to abbreviated content from real radio/podcasts(auditory). Both age groups were less accurate and slower at detecting native compared to traditional advertisements. Fur-ther, older adults had greater difficulty detecting native advertisements on webpages, but no age-related differences wereobserved with auditory materials. The lack of differences in the auditory domain is intriguing, yet it is broadly consistentwith work suggesting spoken language abilities show little or moderate decline. Together, the results demonstrate hownaturalistic stimuli help reveal the extent to which specific domains are affected in cognitive aging.