Age differences in target identification as a function of retinal location and noise level: examination of the useful field of view

Foveal and peripheral target detection were compared in young adults (M age = 22 years) and older adults (M age = 66 years) who were optically corrected for the viewing distance. In a two-alternative, forced-choice task, target letters were presented at 0 degree to 10.5 degrees from fixation. Targets were presented alone, flanked on each side by one noise element (i.e., nontarget letter), or embedded in a horizontal row of 19 noise elements. An Age X Noise Level X Location interaction was obtained, wherein age differences were largest for peripheral targets presented in noise. Slope analyses of latency data showed that the performance of young adults in the high-noise condition was most similar to that of older adults in the low-noise condition. At the functional level, results indicated that aging is associated with a restricted useful field of view. In addition, the data suggest that age differences in search can be described by a model in which older adults take smaller perceptual samples from the visual scene and scan these samples more slowly than do the young adults.     

Adult age differences in short-term memory for serial order: data and a model

Age-related deficits in short-term memory have been widely reported, but reduced overall scores could reflect increased order errors, increased omissions, or increased intrusions. Different explanations for reduced short-term memory with aging lead to different predictions. In this study, young (n = 68; M age = 20 years) and older (n = 99; M age = 65 years) adults were presented with lists of letters and were asked to recall each list immediately in the correct order. Age differences in error patterns were similar for auditory and visual presentation. For example, older adults made more errors of every type, and a greater proportion of the older adults' errors were omissions. An additional condition, in which older adults were encouraged to guess, ruled out an age increase in response threshold as a full explanation for the results. The data were modeled by an oscillator-based computational model of memory for serial order. A good fit to the aging data was achieved by simultaneously altering two parameters that were interpreted as corresponding to frontal decline and response slowing.     

Personality Dysfunction, Coping Styles, and Clinical Symptoms in Younger and Older Adults

This study examined age-related differences in personality disorders, dispositional coping strategies, and clinical symptoms between younger (n = 79; age range = 18–29; M age = 21.2 years) and older (n = 79; age range = 55–89; M age = 65.5 years) persons (matched on gender and ethnicity). Participants completed the Coolidge Axis II Inventory (CATI), Coping Orientations to Problems Experienced Scale (COPE), and Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI). Personality results (t tests) based on the CATI revealed that older persons were significantly more obsessive–compulsive and schizoid than younger adults but significantly lower on 7 scales, including antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and sadistic. As assessed by the COPE, older adults reported lower levels of dysfunctional coping strategies than younger adults. Specifically, older persons were less likely to use mental disengagement, venting of emotions, and alcohol/drugs to cope with problems. BSI results for clinical symptoms revealed that younger adults were significantly higher on 5 of 9 scales, including anxiety, depression, and hostility. Results suggest that younger adults experience higher levels of personality and clinical symptoms and use more dysfunctional coping strategies than older adults, dispelling the myth that old age is associated with inevitable psychological impairment. Theoretical considerations, clinical implications, and future research ideas are discussed.     

Age and motivation predict gaze behavior for facial expressions

This study investigated age-related differences between younger (M = 25.52 years) and older (M = 70.51 years) adults in avoidance motivation and the influence of avoidance motivation on gaze preferences for happy, neutral, and angry faces. In line with the hypothesis of reduced negativity effect later in life, older adults avoided angry faces and (to a lesser degree) preferred happy faces more than younger adults did. This effect cannot be explained by age-related changes in dispositional motivation. Irrespective of age, avoidance motivation predicted gaze behavior towards emotional faces. The study demonstrates the importance of interindividual differences beyond young adulthood.     

Adult age, gender, and race group differences in images of aging

Younger and older African American and Caucasian American adults, who were matched by age (M age = 40.63 years), completed a survey on perceptions of aging and subjective age. The 2 groups did not differ in the age they considered someone to be old (M age = 74.5 years). However, when asked which age was the happiest age, African Americans chose a significantly younger age (M age = 18.26 years) than did Caucasian Americans (M age = 31.32 years), and this racial group difference interacted with age differences such that older Caucasian Americans named an older age than did younger Caucasian Americans. The authors found no such age difference for African Americans. When asked if old age was a happy time, 60% of Caucasian Americans answered yes, whereas only 2% of African Americans answered yes. These and other differences in images and concerns of old age and subjective age suggest a far more negative view of aging for African Americans and a need for changes in the provision of positive information about aging for this group.     

Enhancing Older Adult Eyewitness Memory with the Cognitive Interview

Thirty older (m age=71.73 years) and 20 young adults (m age=21.60 years) viewed a videotape of a simulated crime and were then interviewed with either a Cognitive Interview (CI) or a standard police interview (SI). The older participants were interviewed with either an SI, CI, or CI that was modified for older people (CI–M). No differences were found between the CI and CI–M. The CI elicited more information than the SI, without a reduction in accuracy rate. Moreover, the advantage of the CI over the SI was greater for the older than for the young participants. There were no overall age-related differences. Results are discussed in terms of performance of older witnesses and implications for understanding how the CI functions.     

Adult age differences in the effects of sentence context and stimulus degradation during visual word recognition

I investigated adult age differences in the efficiency of feature-extraction processes during visual word recognition. Participants were 24 young adults (M age = 21.0 years) and 24 older adults (M age = 66.5 years). On each trial, subjects made a word/nonword discrimination (i.e., lexical decision) regarding a target letter-string that was presented as the final item of a sentence context. The target was presented either intact or degraded visually (by the presence of asterisks between adjacent letters). Age differences in lexical decisions speed were greater for degraded targets than for intact targets, suggesting an age-related slowing in the extraction of feature-level information. For degraded word targets, however, the amount of performance benefit provided by the sentence context was greater for older adults than for young adults. It thus appears that an age-related deficiency at an early stage of word recognition is accompanied by an increased contribution from semantic context.     

Age differences in three facets of empathy: performance-based evidence

This study investigated age differences in cognitive and affective facets of empathy: the ability to perceive another's emotions accurately, the capacity to share another's emotions, and the ability to behaviorally express sympathy in an empathic episode. Participants, 80 younger (M(age) = 32 years) and 73 older (M(age) = 59 years) adults, viewed eight film clips, each portraying a younger or an older adult thinking-aloud about an emotionally engaging topic that was relevant to either younger adults or older adults. In comparison to their younger counterparts, older adults generally reported and expressed greater sympathy while observing the target persons; and they were better able to share the emotions of the target persons who talked about a topic that was relevant to older adults. Age-related deficits in the cognitive ability to accurately perceive another's emotions were only evident when the target person talked about a topic of little relevance to older adults. In sum, the present performance-based evidence speaks for multidirectional age differences in empathy.     

Age/Cohort Differences in Judgments About Criminal Transgressions

To examine possible age/cohort differences in social judgment processes, young and older adults were asked to evaluate criminal offenders described in case files that manipulated both race of offender and the extenuating circumstances preceding the crime. Direct mail was used to reach a wider sample; 218 young (M = 30.21 years) and 167 older (M = 68.57 years) adults provided usable responses. Older adults more strongly recommended parole and estimated less future crime than young adults. There were no age differences in attributions to the criminal's basic nature, but respondents from older age groups and earlier born cohorts more frequently attributed crimes to circumstances. Respondents' judgments of White and Black criminals were generally equitable. Findings suggest that older adults may attach greater importance to contextual factors in their judgments of criminals' actions and make more circumstantial attributions than young adults when there is sufficient context to offer a nondispositional account for behavior.     

Aging, body image, and body shape

Participants were 25 older men (M age = 72 years, SD = 10 years) and 27 older women (M age = 71 years, SD = 8 years) who examined multiple line-drawing figures of babies, children, young adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults. Participants picked a number on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (very thin) to 9 (very obese) in response to questions including "Which is the most attractive?" and "Which figure would you most like to look like?" They also completed questionnaires about their body image and body shape. In response to the age-specific line drawings (e.g., those depicting older men and older women), older women endorsed thinner figures (e.g., picked smaller numbers) than did men. Likewise, older women reported thinking more about their body shape and appearance than did men and perceived their body image as "a little too big" in comparison with the older men who perceived their body image as "just the right size." However, a breakdown of normal and overweight women in this sample revealed that for some overweight elderly women, obesity could become a satisfactory way of life. Much as with college-aged women, the endorsement of a thinner body image by many of the older adult female participants appeared to persist into late adulthood and suggests that research into body image issues with older adults is relevant and necessary.     

Still young at heart: negative age-related information motivates distancing from same-aged people

Research on subjective age has shown that most older adults feel significantly younger than their chronological age. One of the proposed mechanisms for this subjective age effect is that distancing oneself from an age group that is associated with decline in functioning helps older adults maintain a positive view of themselves. Providing negative age-related information, then, should lead older adults to direct their attention away from stimuli that remind them of their age and to distance themselves from same-aged people. In 2 experiments (N? = 78, 65-83 years of age, M = 71.67, SD = 4.81; N? = 98, 65-87 years of age, M = 70.52, SD = 4.89), older adults were confronted with positive, neutral, or negative age-related information. The salience of age increased after receiving negative age-related information. Furthermore, older adults directed their gaze away from pictures of older adults and looked longer at middle-aged adults after being confronted with negative age-related information. In addition, Study 2 showed that negative age-related information led older adults to distance themselves from same-aged people. Moreover, they perceived themselves as being more similar to middle-aged than to older adults. These findings highlight the motivational processes that might contribute to the discrepancy between chronological and subjective age in older adults and the psychological function of this discrepancy. Feeling younger might allow older adults to maintain a positive view of themselves despite age-related losses.     

Adult age differences in elaborations produced during prose recall

This study focused on adult age differences in the characteristics and quantity of elaborations produced during a prose recall task. Young (M = 24.3 years) and older (M = 67.9 years) adults were tested in 3 same-age, same-gender group size conditions: individual, dyad, and tetrad. Elaborations, which are statements not contained in the text but not inconsistent with it, were divided into 2 major categories. Denotative elaborations included statements that were closely related to the text and filled in gaps in the stories. These elaborations were equally produced by young and older adults and were significantly correlated with gist recall performance. Annotative elaborations were evaluative and interpretive comments. These statements were more frequently produced by older adults but were not correlated with recall performance. Young and older adults had different patterns of annotative elaboration production across group size conditions.     

Refining CVLT-II recognition discriminability indices to enhance the characterization of recognition memory changes in healthy aging

The present study examined age-related differences on the four false-positive (FP) error subtypes found on the California Verbal Learning Test-Second Edition yes/no recognition memory trial and the influence of these subtypes on source and novel recognition discriminability (SoRD and NRD, respectively) index calculations. Healthy older (n = 55) adults generally made more FP errors than healthy young adults (n = 57). Accordingly, older adults performed worse than young adults on all SoRD and NRD indices. However, the manner in which FP error subtypes were incorporated into SoRD and NRD index calculations impacted the magnitudes of observed differences between and within the two age groups on SoRD and NRD indices. The present findings underline the importance of examining FP errors in assessments of recognition memory abilities, and using more refined indices of recognition discriminability to further elucidate the nature of age-related recognition memory impairment.     

Processing speed, executive function, and age differences in remembering and knowing.

A group of young (n = 52, M = 23.27 years) and old (n = 52, M = 68.62 years) adults studied two lists of semantically unrelated nouns. For one list a time of 2 s was allowed for encoding, and for the other, 5 s. A recognition test followed where participants classified their responses according to Gardiner's (1988) remember-know procedure. Age differences for remembering and knowing were minimal in the faster 2-s encoding condition. However, in the longer 5-s encoding condition, younger persons produced significantly more remember responses, and older adults a greater number of know responses. This dissociation suggests that in the longer encoding condition, younger adults utilized a greater level of elaborative rehearsal governed by executive processes, whereas older persons employed maintenance rehearsal involving short-term memory. Statistical control procedures, however, found that independent measures of processing speed accounted for age differences in remembering and knowing and that independent measures of executive control had little influence. The findings are discussed in the light of contrasting theoretical accounts of recollective experience in old age.     

Does a time-monitoring deficit influence older adults' delayed retrieval shift during skill acquisition?

The authors evaluated age-related time-monitoring deficits and their contribution to older adults' reluctance to shift to memory retrieval in the noun-pair lookup (NP) task. Older adults (M = 67 years) showed slower rates of response time (RT) improvements than younger adults (M = 19 years), because of a delayed strategy shift. Older adults estimated scanning latencies as being faster than they actually were and showed poor resolution in discriminating short from long RTs early in practice. The difference in estimated RT for retrieval and scanning strategies predicted retrieval use, independent of actual RT differences. Separate scanning and recognition memory tasks revealed larger time-monitoring differences for older adults than in the NP task. Apparently, the context of heterogeneous RTs as a result of strategy use in the NP task improved older adults' accuracy of RT estimates. RT feedback had complex effects on time-monitoring accuracy, although it generally improved absolute and relative accuracy of RT estimates. Feedback caused older adults to shift more rapidly to the retrieval strategy in the NP task. Results suggest that deficient time monitoring plays a role in older adults' delayed retrieval shift, although other factors (e.g., confidence in the retrieval strategy) also play a role.     

Depression and Anxiety in Older and Middle‐aged Adults With Diabetes

This study aims to compare rates of depressive and anxious symptoms among older adults with and without diabetes. The study also examines differences in depression, anxiety, and diabetes‐related emotional distress between middle‐aged and older adults with diabetes. A total of 224 participants completed a range of questionnaires measuring depression, anxiety, and diabetes‐related emotional distress (if applicable). One hundred and three adults with diabetes (55 middle‐aged, mean age = 47 years, range 40–59 years and 48 older, mean age = 69 years, range 60–81 years) were recruited from a tertiary diabetes clinic. One hundred and twenty‐one adults without diabetes (72 middle‐aged, mean age = 52 years, range 40–59 years and 49 older, mean age = 65 years, range 60–76 years) were recruited from either a university student pool or a registry of adults aged 50 and above. Older adults with diabetes had significantly higher levels of depression and comparable levels of anxiety with older adults without diabetes. Older adults with diabetes had significantly lower levels of depression, anxiety, and diabetes‐related distress than middle‐aged adults with diabetes. Diabetes is associated with high rates of depression and anxiety, with middle‐aged adults more adversely affected than older adults.     

Age and skilled performance: contributions of working memory and processing speed

In this study, we examined the interrelationships among age, working memory (WM), processing speed, and the development of skilled performance. Younger (M=20.5) and older (M=68.9) adults were trained on an alphabet arithmetic task (Haider & Frensch, 1996) administered across three consecutive days. Although older adults were slower than younger adults, both age groups' response latencies decreased as a result of practice. Contrary to expectations, WM and processing speed were significantly correlated with performance late in training. Partial correlations suggested that age differences in performance at the end of training were mediated by individual differences in cognitive processing speed.     

Timing of reflexive visuospatial orienting in young, young-old, and old-old adults

This study examined adult age differences in reflexive orienting to two types of uninformative spatial cues: central arrows and peripheral onsets. In two experiments using a Posner cuing task, young adults (ages 18–28 years), young-old adults (60–74 years), and old-old adults (75–92 years) responded to targets that were preceded 100–1,000 ms earlier by a central arrow or a peripheral abrupt onset. In Experiment 1, the cue remained present upon target onset. Facilitation effects at short cue–target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) were prolonged in duration for the two older groups relative to the young adults. At longer cue–target SOAs, inhibition of return (IOR) that was initiated by peripheral onset cues was observed in the performance of young adults but not in that of the two older groups. In Experiment 2, the cue was presented briefly and removed prior to target onset. The change in cue duration minimized age differences (particularly for young-old adults) in facilitation effects and led to IOR for all three age groups. The findings are consistent with the idea that attentional control settings change with age, with higher settings for older adults leading to delayed disengagement from spatial cues.     

Are Older Adults More Dependent on Visual Information in Regulating Self-Motion Than Younger Adults?

Older adults look at the ground more while they are walking than younger adults do. In the present study, the effect of blocking that exproprioceptive visual information on the walking pattern of older adults was investigated. The first 0.75 m of the floor in front of healthy young adults (n = 10, mean age = 26.0 years) and 2 groups of older adults (n = 10, mean age 65.7 years; and n = 9, mean age = 75.9 years) was occluded. The dependent variables were step velocity, step length, and step frequency. The effect of the manipulation on those kinematic variables increased with age. The older adults had a significant increase in velocity and step length. The possible use of optic flow information from the ground to regulate the velocity of self-motion is discussed.     

Age-related differences in the rhythmic structure of the golf swing

Participants were 20 younger golfers (M age=19.8 years, SD=1.84 years) and 20 older golfers (M age=63.0 years, SD=2.55 years) who attempted 40- and 80-yard eight-iron shots requiring an adjustment of their force and timing. No age-related differences were found in the tempo or speed of the shot; however, there were differences in the rhythmic relationship between the clubhead force and the weight shift. Whereas younger golfers primarily exhibited a 3 versus 2 polyrhythmic pattern between the peak forces of the clubhead and weight shift, older golfers primarily exhibited a simpler 3 versus 3 rhythmic force pattern by adding a forward weight shift at the beginning of the shot. Additionally, older golfers exhibited less independence between the timing of the clubhead force and weight shift, which indicated greater use of a single integrated coordinative unit rather than 2 units. These findings are interpreted as compensations for age-related slowing and increased temporal variability that help to preserve tempo at a speed comparable to younger adults.