Abstract
Comparisons were made of the response latencies of old (mean age = 69.2 years) and young (mean age = 26.8 years) subjects on simple and choice reaction time (RT) tasks and “physical identity” (PI) and “name identity” (NI) trials of a letter-matching task. Young subjects were faster than old subjects on all tasks, and the absolute difference between groups increased with processing complexity (simple RT < choice RT< PI <NI). However, in support of the hypothesis that aging is associated with a general reduction in processing speed, the relative difference between groups did not vary with task, except for a subset of the NI trials. Response latencies for the NI trials varied with stimulus letter for both age groups, but the magnitude of the letter effect was greater for the elderly. Their latencies were disproportionately long for the more difficult letters. A second experiment showed that NI latency reflected the visual similarity of the letters with respect to the other letters in the stimulus set. It is suggested, therefore, that the NI letter effect resulted from differences in letter identification time. The disproportionately long latencies of the elderly for the visually similar letters are discussed in terms of the hypothesis that aging is associated with an increase in internal noise.
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Rumelhart, D. A.A multicomponent theory of confusion among briefly exposed alphabetic characters (Tech. Rep. 22). University of California, San Diego, Center for Human Information Processing, November 1971.
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This research was supported in part by grants from the National Institute on Aging (AG02130) and the National Institute of Mental Health (MH26870).
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Lindholm, J.M., Parkinson, S.R. An interpretation of age-related differences in letter-matching performance. Perception & Psychophysics 33, 283–294 (1983). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202866
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202866