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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| A multimodal assessment of sensory thresholds in aging | | Author(s) | Joseph C Stevens, L Alberto Cruz, Lawrence E Marks |
| Journal title | The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological sciences and social sciences, vol 53B, no 4, July 1998 |
| Pages | pp P263-P272 |
| Keywords | Sense organ problems ; Cognitive processes ; Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25] ; Correlation ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Young and older people were subjected to forced-choice detection thresholds in each of seven sensory tasks: taste of sodium chloride (salt); smell of butanol; cooling (for temperature); low-frequency vibrotaction (vibration felt by touch); high-frequency vibrotaction; low-frequency hearing; and high-frequency hearing. Average scores across these tasks nearly perfectly separated the 22 older from the 15 young subjects. For individual modalities, however, separation between the groups varied from complete (high-frequency touch) to negligible (low-frequency hearing). Scores on the Boston Picture Naming Test and especially the Wechsler Logical Memory Test correlated strongly with average threshold score (Pearson r=.80) and moderately with scores on individual modalities. This sensory-cognitive link is not caused, as might be supposed, by diminishing age-related capacity to handle the detection task, because the very same task resulted in negligible age effect (low-frequency hearing) and large effect (high-frequency hearing) in the same individuals. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-980903239 A |
| Classmark | BLP: DA: BB: SD6: 49: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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