Effects of practice on the matching familiar figures test: A comparison of young,middle-aged and elderly adults

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of practice on a modified version of the Matching Familiar Figures test in young, middle-aged and elderly adults. Forty-eight young, 48 middle-aged and 48 elderly adults were each presented with 48 match-to-standard items. the dependent variables were the number of errors committed and the latency to first response. the performance of both young and middle-aged adults reflected rather stable speed/accuracy trade-off decisions that did not change as a function of practice. the young adults responded more quickly and made more errors than the middle-aged adults across all 48 trials. the performance of elderly adults, on the other hand, did change as a result of practice; their latencies increased and their error rate decreased across trials. Elderly adults started out making more errors than young adults but by the end of the 48 trials, their error rate was lower than that of young adults. In the final trials, the error rate of elderly adults was midway between the rates of young and middle-aged adults. Thus, practice facilitated the performance of elderly adults but had no effect on the performance of young and middle-aged adults.