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A study of the impulsivity measures from intelligence tests and information-processing tests of elderly volunteers reveals that stable strategic preferences are independent of test ability. The stability of speed accuracy strategies across tests proves that impulsivity may serve as an additional predictor of cognitive performance. However, there is no proof of the association of stability with increasing age or extraversion. The study measures impulsivity as an index of speed-accuracy preference by using personality questionnaires.

Brinley plots help arrange the performance distributions of two groups of 111 adults each aged 60 and 75 years, subjected to visual search and letter coding tasks. Response times plotted against age groups reveal linear fits for both tasks with negative intercepts and slopes higher than 1. A general linear model involving varying slope and intercept values for the two tasks is more efficient than multiplicative and additive aging models.

Moderate doses of alcohol impair performance on a variety of information processing tasks. Two separate meta-analyses were conducted on the results of (1) reaction time studies, and (2) recognition memory [...]

The correlation of aging with cognitive performance and mental speed was tested in 104 subjects aged 54 to 85 years old using four-choice reaction time, inspection time and speeded coding-substitution task. Reaction time and coding in the aged are dependent on the motor skills and efficiency of response organization. Peripheral visual efficiency, on the other hand, affects inspection time. Results also show that higher intelligence does not protect against the influence of aging on spatial ability tests, memory and information processing tasks.

It is commonly believed that older people recall events from their distant past better than they recall more recent events. There is some question whether this may be due to a preference for reminiscence, a sense of uneventfulness in the present making past events seem more anecdotal, or simply that older people often live in the past because they have difficulty with recent memories. Another possibility is that the way people use their memory affects their ability to recall. For instance, those who have daily use for recall of recent events, such as young people and older people who live independently, may better recall recent events than older persons who live in residential care. The latter have less of a need to recall recent events because there is less happening for them in the present; more time is spent reminiscing. To test this hypothesis, two groups of elderly people were compared. The first consisted of 16 subjects aged 70 to 85 years living independently. The second group was 35 subjects aged 68 to 97 years and living in residential care. The groups were matched on measures of intelligence. There were 22 cognitively impaired subjects in group two. All subjects were given a three-page form, each page titled for a different third of their life, on which they were asked to list memories from the time period and rate the number of times they recall remembering that event. This was a measure of how rehearsed the memory was. It was found that subjects from residential care tended to recall memories more often from the earlier parts of their lives, and they rehearsed these memories more. The group living independently showed an opposite effect. Unimpaired subjects living under care recalled more recent memories than impaired subjects under care, but still produced mostly past memories. Impaired subjects produced few memories at all, but again the majority were past. In summary, those living in residential care rehearsed earlier memories more than those living independently, and they recalled those memories more frequently than less-rehearsed, more recent memories. It appears that the use people make of their memories has an effect on what material they can recall. (Consumer Summary produced by Reliance Medical Information, Inc.)

To study the mechanisms underlying covert orienting of attention in visual space, subjects were given advance cues indicating the probable locations of targets that they had to discriminate and localize. Direct peripheral cues (brightening of one of hour boxes in peripheral vision) and symbolic central cues (an arrow at the fixation point indicating a probable peripheral box) were compared. Peripheral and central cues are believed to activate different reflexive and voluntary modes of orienting (Jonides, 1981; Posner, 1980). Experiment 1 showed that the time courses of facilitation and inhibition from peripheral and central cues were characteristic and different. Experiment 2 showed that voluntary orienting in response to symbolic central cues is interrupted by reflexive orienting to random peripheral flashes. Experiment 3 showed that irrelevant peripheral flashes also compete with relevant peripheral cues. The amount of interference varied systematically with the interval between the onset of the relevant cue and of the distracting flash (cue-flash onset asynchrony) and with the cuing condition. Taken together, these effects support a model for spatial attention with distinct but interacting reflexive and voluntary orienting mechanisms.

There is a correlation between culture fair, age, memory, vocabulary and cross-out speed and individual differences in initial performance on a letter-letter coding task, according to research seeking to identify how and why different cognitive abilities are interconnected in performance of a specific task. It was also established that memory also predicts systematic individual differences in rate of improvement over four 2-min trials. This research supports studies indicating that coding-type tasks are not necessarily pure measures of cognitive speed, separate from other cognitive abilities, but are potentially factorially detailed measures that also include elements of these other abilities.