Centre for Policy on Ageing



The attentional demands of encoding and retrieval in younger and older adults — 2. evidence from secondary task reaction time distributions
Author(s)	Nicole D Anderson
Journal title	Psychology and Aging, vol 14, no 4, December 1999
Pages	pp 645-655
Keywords	Cognitive processes ; Mental ageing ; Older people ; Young adults [20-25] ; United States of America.
Annotation	Three studies examined the effects of encoding or retrieval on properties of secondary task reaction time (RT) distributions in younger and older adults, Relative to full attention conditions, encoding and retrieval increased secondary task RT medians and standard deviations more for older adults than for younger adults, and the age-related RT increase was most pronounced among the slowest RTs. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed two age-related mechanisms underlying these effects, which were interpreted as cognitive slowing and reductions in attentional resources. The studies concluded that cognitive slowing affects the entire RT distribution regardless of the memory task, By contrast, reduced attentional resources result in very long RTs, especially when the tasks require self-initiated encoding or retrieval operations. (AKM).
Accession Number	CPA-000403409 A
Classmark	DA: D6: B: SD6: 7T
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.