Reaction time as a function of age, anxiety, and typicality

Abstract

Elderly adults were compared with high and low test-anxious young adults on a task that required deciding whether a word could be considered an instance of the category name shown with it. The words were either typical or atypical members of the category. The elderly adults showed the slowest reaction times for all decisions, and the age difference was proportionally the same for atypical and typical instances. Elderly subjects were more like highanxiety young adults than like low-anxiety young adults for atypical instances. but elderly subjects were significantly worse than anxious young adults for typical instances and unrelated words. These results offer some support for the role of anxiety in producing the aging performance deficit. but this factor seems insufficient to explain all age-related performance differences.

Initiating the formalization of theories of cognitive aging.

“…For example, young and old adults have been shown to exhibit qualitatively similar priming effects in word recognition (e.g., Bowles & Poon, 1985;Burke, White, & Diaz, 1987;Burke & Yee, 1984;Cerella & Fozard, 1984;Chiarello, Church, & Hoyer, 1985;Howard, 1983;Howard, Lasaga, & McAndrews, 1980;Howard, McAndrews, & Lasaga, 1981;Howard, Shaw, & Heisey, 1986;Madden, 1986), to have similar patterns of word associations (e.g., Burke & Peters, 1986;How-ard, 1980;Lovelace & Cooley, 1982;Scialfa & Margolis, 1986), to exhibit release from proactive inhibition under the same types of shifts in to-be-remembered items (e.g., Elias & Hirasuna, 1976;Mistler-Lachman, 1977;Puglisi, 1980), and to be similar in their sensitivity to, or use of, scripts (Light & Anderson, 1983) and schemata or prototypes (e.g., Hess & Slaughter, 1986). There is also considerable evidence that young and older adults are similarly affected by manipulations that can be presumed to reflect structural properties such as category typicality (e.g., Byrd, 1984;Eysenck, 1975;Mueller, Kausler, Faherty, & Olivieri, 1980), word frequency (e.g., Bowles & Poon, 1981;Poon & Fozard, 1980;Thomas, Fozard, & Waugh, 1977), and acoustic versus semantic relatedness of task material (e.g., Petros, Zehr, & Chabot, 1983). An implication from results such as these is that aging does not fundamentally alter the nature of one's cognitive structure, but that it merely reduces the efficiency of processing within that structure.…”

Impaired attention in depressive states: a non-specific deficit?

“…The age of onset may also affect the character of the illness, with some studies suggesting that the retarded component is less marked in older depressed subjects (Pull et al 1976). Age itself affects attentional measures, such as reaction times (Mueller et al 1980) and one must control for this variable when studying attention. Further, even when depression is diagnosed carefully by standard operational criteria (Hamilton, 1967;Spitzer et al 1978;American Psychiatric Association, 1994), patients may vary widely in their levels of anxiety -and anxiety, in turn, has specific effects on attention (Mialet, 1989;Eysenck, 1990).…”

Lexical access and age.

“…In a slightly different procedure, Mueller, Kausler, and Faherty (1980) obtained an estimate of lexical access time itself. Subjects judged whether a target word matched a previously exposed prime word in category membership, a task clearly involving lexical access as well as encoding, decision, and response.…”