Centre for Policy on Ageing



Behavioral slowing with age — boundary conditions of the generalized slowing model
Author(s)	Joan M Swearer, Kevin J Kane
Journal title	The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol 51B, no 4, July 1996
Pages	pp P189-P200
Keywords	Cognitive processes ; Mental speed ; Cross sectional surveys ; United States of America.
Annotation	122 adults aged 20 to 83 years participated in this study of visual discrimination and recognition. The simultaneous matching to sample (discrimination) and delayed matching to sample (recognition) paradigms used identical stimuli for spatial frequency, luminance, spatial localisation, orientation, pattern, trajectory, and velocity matching. Linear regression analyses indicated that increased age slowed reaction time on the stimulus matching tasks. This relationship was not found, however, when subjects were required to match the stimuli after a delay. When older adults' reaction times were regressed on those in their 20s, very different patterns of age-related slowing emerged from the data as a function of task requirements. Results on simultaneous matching replicate previous reports of general slowing on non-lexical tasks, but was not so for results on delayed matching, which used similar stimuli but also involved short-term memory.
Accession Number	CPA-970704008 A
Classmark	DA: DG: 3KB: 7T
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing

...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.