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Age-related differences in continuous recognition memory were assessed in adults. High and low frequency words were presented to the subject one at a time. No age difference was found in recognition latency or errors. Low frequency words were recognized faster and with higher accuracy. (Author)

Analyzes auditory reaction time (RT) data from community-dwelling volunteers with ages ranging from 17 to 96. Cross-sectional analyses; Longitudinal analyses.

Letter recognition was investigated in 16 young adults (mean age = 21) and in 16 older men (mean age = 64) by exposing seven-letter strings for brief periods followed by a mask. Young adults were able to identify three letters at a rate of 27 msec per letter, a value which is typical of other reports. Any additional letters were identified at a much slower rate. In contrast, older adults were able to identify only two letters, at a rate of 35 msec per letter. Older men thus showed a decline in both the amount of and rate at which information was encoded from the icon within a fixation period. These findings have implications for experiments involving visual arrays. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research has established that subjects required to identify tilted patterns do so by first rotating them mentally into an upright position. Gaylord and marsh (1975) found that the rate of mental rotation of elderly subjects was 84% slower than young subjects. Using simpler patterns and collegeenrolled “elderly,” jacewicz and hartley (1979) found no age difference in rotation rates. Using jacewicz and hartley's patterns, and a subject sample more similar to gaylord and marsh's, the present study found that although absolute rates were increased, an age-decline of 96% was still in evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fifty-seven males representing groups with median ages of 20, 52, and 63 years were presented with a long sequence of words. Using a four point scale, they judged whether each word was presented for the first (“new”) or second (“old”) time in the sequence. High and low frequency words and separations of 0 to 64 words between the two presentations of a given word were employed. Analyses of errors, confidence judgments and decision times revealed minimal or no age difference when the number of words intervening between successive presentations did not exceed the span of immediate memory. Older subjects' performance declined more rapidly than younger subjects from 3 to 12 second retention intervals, but declined at about the same rate from 12 to 192 second retention intervals. Low frequency words were better remembered by all age groups and there was no interaction between the effects of age and word frequency in any dependent measure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The time required to name four groups of pictures was measured in 83 community dwelling males (18-70 years of age). One group consisted of objects used 50 to 70 years ago (unique dated exemplars), and another consisted of objects unique to contemporary times (unique contemporary exemplars). For comparison, other pictures of contemporary and dated objects commonly used in both periods were employed. There were three major findings. One, the familiarity of the pictured object is the major determinant of the time required to retrieve its name. Older subjects named the dated unique objects that were relatively more familiar to them more rapidly than did younger adults, while the reverse was true for contemporary unique objects. No age difference in the speed of naming common contemporary objects was found. Two, the overall age-related difference in naming latency was attributed to perceptual-motor aspects of the task. Three, the physical features as well as the familiarity of the object contributed to the speed of retrieval of the object's name. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two experiments were carried out to measure age-related differences in speed of error-free recall by normal adults. The major results were that: (a) the time taken to read a word aloud (retrieval from lexical memory) does not increase appreciably until subjects reach their 60s; (b) the time taken to recall a verbal item just attended to (retrieval from primary memory) increases steadily throughout the adult years, and most markedly between the sixth and seventh decades; and, (c) the time taken to recall recent verbal information outside the span of attention (retrieval from secondary memory) also increases as a function of chronological age, at a relatively rapid rate and most markedly between the fifth and sixth decades. The effects are independent of the number of stimulus-response alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sixty-five healthy males (31 to 75 years old) memorized lists of six letters (familiar or unfamiliar organization). Letters were then presented singly, and subjects responded or according to whether a given letter was in the memorized set. Subjects of all ages took longer to respond in the case of the unfamiliar list. This was disproportionately true for the oldest subjects, consistent with the idea that the age-related differences in the unfamiliar condition could not be wholly accounted for by psychomotor factors. The distributions of response latencies in the oldest groups had greater variance and skew. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relation between three cognitive ability factors — Information Processing Ability (IPA), Manual Dexterity (MD), and Pattern Analysis Capability (PAC) — and three personality dimensions — Anxiety, Extroversion, and Openness to Experience — were examined in three age groups. Subjects were 969 male volunteers ranging in age from 25 to 82. Subjects high in anxiety scored lower on all three cognitive factors; subjects open to experience scored higher on IPA and PAC; and introverted subjects scored higher on PAC. Most of these effects remained when the education and socio-economic status were held constant in covariance analyses. Older subjects performed less well than younger ones on MD and PAC, but not on IPA. While personality has some influence on cognitive performance, the declines with age in performance on some cognitive tasks are not mediated by personality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Binary choice-reaction times for 123 males, 25-79 years of age, were obtained in a sequence of discrete trials in which the proportion of occasions that the same stimulus was presented twice in succession varied from .25, .50, and .75 or from .75, .50, and .25 over successive thirds of the sequence. Stimulus alternations were responded to more rapidly than stimulus repetitions by subjects in all age groups, especially in trial blocks with .75 alternations. The absolute differences in mean reaction time to stimulus alternations and repetitions increased with age. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that reaction times are affected both by pre-existing expectations for stimulus alternations as well as expectations for stimulus alternations or repetitions developed during the course of the experiment. Mean response latency as well as between-and within-subject variability in performance increased with age. Analyses of frequency distributions of the reaction times indicated that the psychomotor component of reaction time increases with age while the decision-making component becomes more variable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Subjects released one key with the right hand upon presentation of a red light and another with the left hand when a green light was presented. Each stimulus occurred an equal number of times in a sequence of 40 trials, but the probability that it would do so twice in succession was only .25. The subjects were male volunteers who ranged in age from the 20s through the 70s. Mean response latency increased with age, although variability did not. Stimulus alternations were responded to more rapidly than repetitions by subjects in all age-groups, a result consistent with an expectancy theory of choice reaction-time. A detailed analysis of the frequency distributions of reaction-times suggests that the older individuals' longer latencies reflect impaired psychomotor rather than decision-making efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A critical issue in cross-sectional aging studies is the comparability of subjects of different ages, particularly regarding health status. For example, it is typically assumed that healthy 60-year-old men are equivalent to healthy 80-year-old men when both age groups are selected using the same criteria. The 60-year-old, however, may not survive or be healthy at age 80. To examine this issue, 212 healthy 60-year-old men in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging were identified. By life table analysis, 30= were expected to survive and remain healthy to age 80. In this study, 61 healthy 60-year-old men were followed to age 80. When compared with 125 healthy 80-year-old men, they had more heart disease, cancer, stroke, arterial, digestive, and peripheral nervous system diseases. Twenty-seven of the 61 men (44=) actually continued to be healthy at age 80. At age 60, systolic pressure and total serum cholesterol were predictive of who would be healthy at age 80 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although there are well-recognized declines in visual functioning with age, their contribution to the problems of older persons on tasks in the natural environment, including driving, are largely unknown. Adults ranging in age from 22-92 years were surveyed in regard to their visual difficulties when driving and performing everyday tasks. The visual problems of drivers increased with age along five different visual dimensions: unexpected vehicles, vehicle speed, dim displays, windshield problems, and sign reading. Several of the age-related visual problems that were reported appear to be related to the types of automobile accidents more common among older drivers. The study also replicated the findings from an earlier investigation of non-driving tasks that showed visual declines with age on five dimensions: visual processing speed, light sensitivity, dynamic vision, near vision and visual search. These findings indicate promising areas of research regarding the effects of visual aging on tasks in the natural environment [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Longitudinal studies have contributed much to the understanding of aging. Traditionally, age-specific changes in physiological functioning are inferred from studies in which persons with disease processes believed to be relevant to the function in question are excluded from the results. The main theme of this review is that, in the future, studies of aging must better attempt to capture the interplay between disease and aging processes. A variety of research results, mostly from the Baltimore Longitudinal study of aging, are used to support this argument. Topics covered include: the role of longitudinal studies in aging research; the complexity of the aging process; the significance of cohort and secular changes for understanding both aging and disease processes; age changes over the adult life span in the significance of risk factors for disease; and age-related increases in morbidity in a longevous group of men [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]