Skilled performance: Effects of adult age and experience on elementary processes.

Abstract

SUMMARYDespite a general neglect in contemporary research of the role of practice on the performance of simple components of skill, considerable evidence indicates that experience leads to substantial improvement in detection, discrimination, ani speeded classification. One goal of the present research was to identify the mechanisms responsible for practice-related improvement in such elementary tasks. A second goal was to determine whether there are adult age differences in the magnitude of practicerelated improvement on simple perceptual and cognitive skills or in the mechanisms used to achieve that improvement.Eight young adults (ages 19 to 27 years) and 8 older adults (ages 62 to 73 years) performed four simple tasks for 5l experimental sessions. On several sessions the subjects received qualitatively or quantitatively different stimuli to determine the mechanisms responsible for improvement. A concurrent reaction-time task was also performed at three different periods to assess the level of residual capacity after various amounts of practice.The results were interpreted as suggesting that improvement is due to shifts in the type of information being processed, in the identity or sequence of processing operations, and in the attention requirements of the task. A model incorporating these mechanisms is proposed and its application to the data is discussed.Age differences persisted on nearly every performance measure throughout all levels of practice. Moreover, there was little evidence that young and old subjects were qualitatively different in the manner in which they performed the tasks. It is suggested that the major difference between young and old adults on simple perceptual and cognitive tasks is the rate of processing nearly all types of information.Skill generally refers to the possession of expertise in some fairly complex, temporally interrelated behavior. For example, a skilled typist or pianist has a well coordinated sequence of manual keystrokes; the development of that coordination is probably the major part of skill acquisition in these domains, because the keystrokes themselves are extremely simple in isolation. However, in other areas of skill it is possible that performance of each individual component changes with increasing expertise. Perhaps substantial improvements do not occur in the quality of a simple keystroke, but other perceptual or motoric aspects of skill might improve independent of the overall coordinated integration of the components.Consider the case of drivine an automobile. Driving involves a complex coordinated sequence of perceptual and motor activities, and the skilled driver almost certainly possesses a more efficient integration and coordination of these activities than the novice driver. The expert is probably better able to turn the steering wheel while applying pressure to the brake or accelerator, to engage the clutch with his or her foot while manually shifting gears, to sound the horn while applying pressure to the brakes, and so on. One could also ask. however, ...

Cognitive addition: Strategy choice and speed-of-processing differences in gifted, normal, and mathematically disabled children.

“…Consistent with many other cognitive aging studies (e.g., Cerella, 1985;Salthouse & Somberg, 1982), the young adults showed an advantage relative to the elderly adults in the rate of information processing. However, contrary to generalized slowing models of age-related changes in rate of information processing (Cerella, 1990;Myerson et al, 1990), the componential analysis of the retrieval trial Rig suggested that the group difference in speed of processing might not have been uniform across basic processes.…”

“…In fact, the elderly were more likely to use the less time-consuming retrieval strategy than were the younger adults. The Nebes (1978) and Salthouse and Somberg (1982) findings of no age difference in verbal production RTs suggests that the intercept difference might not be related to age differences in the rate of verbally producing an addition answer, although Charness (1987) found that young adults showed about a 28-ms advantage over elderly adults on a similar verbal production task. Thus, it is possible that a portion of the intercept difference is related to age differences in rate of verbally producing an answer, although the 28-ms estimate (Charness, 1987) would not explain the entire intercept difference.…”

“…Charness (1981) found that elderly chess players when selecting a chess move showed a more efficient search of the problem space relative to younger peers, whereas Hartley and Anderson (1983) found that young adults used more efficient problem-solving strategies than elderly adults for the solution of the Twenty Questions task. Finally, Salthouse and Somberg (1982) argued that the problem-solving strategies used by young and elderly adults did not differ across an array of simple information-processing tasks (also see Charness & Campbell, 1988;Myerson, Hale, Wagstaff, Poon,& Smith, 1990). The key to resolving these apparently contradictory claims probably resides in both the complexity (i.e., working memory demands) of the task (Salthouse, Mitchell, Skovronek, & Babcock, 1989) and the level of task familiarity of the young and elderly subjects (Charness & Bieman-Copland, in press).…”

“…Many scientists in the cognitive aging area have argued that the rate of information processing slows with age but disagree as to the exact nature of the function relating age to the slowing of central (e.g., computational) and peripheral (i.e., sensory-motor) mechanisms (Birren, 1965;Cerella, 1985;Charness, 1981;Hertzog, 1989;Hertzog, Raskind, & Cannon, 1986;Madden, 1985;Mueller, Kausler, & Faherty, 1980;Salthouse & Somberg, 1982;Schaie, 1989). More recently, Cerella (1990) and Myerson et al (1990) argued that aging is associated with a general slowing of the rate of information processing across all domains.…”

Behavioral Gerontology: Application of Behavioral Methods to the Problems of Older Adults

“…When adapting behavioral procedures to elderly clients, special recognition must be made of the fundamental physiological changes in the elderly (Salthouse & Somberg, 1982) and the frequent decline in the health of these clients. Attempts to adapt the Foxx and Azrin (1973) toilet training procedure for use with the elderly provide an excellent lesson.…”