Measurement of correlation between age and the human visual interpolation ability

The possibility to evaluate brain functions through the human visual interpolation ability is studied in this work. The human visual interpolation ability is defined as the recognition ability to efficiently and accurately identify an object based on object parts. A letter recognition experiment was designed to measure the human visual interpolation ability for partially erased objects. An algorithm was designed to create incomplete letters as stimuli for the experiment. 54 subjects aged from 21 to 76 years participated in the experiment. The experiment results showed that the correct identification rate decreased with the increase of age on average. The subjects were grouped into 6 groups according to their ages (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s) and a two-tailed t-test of group means was carried out. The t-test results showed that the correct rate decreased with aging more significantly after 50 years old than before 50 years old. The correlation indicates that visual interpolation ability decreases with the increase of age. Furthermore, it indicates the possibility to check the related brain functions based on the correlation between age and visual interpolation ability.