Aging and measures of processing speed

doi:10.1016/S0301-0511(00)00052-1

Biological Psychology

Volume 54, Issues 1–3, October 2000, Pages 35-54

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0301-0511(00)00052-1 Get rights and content

Abstract

Many variables have been assumed to reflect speed of processing, and most are strongly related to age in the period of adulthood. One of the primary theoretical questions with respect to aging and speed concerns the relative roles of specific and general age-related effects on particular speed variables. Distinguishing between specific (or unique) and general (or shared) age-related influences on measures of speed has been complicated, in part because the issues are sometimes framed in terms of extreme all-or-none positions, and because few researchers have employed analytical procedures suitable for estimating the relative contributions of each type of influence. However, recent methods focusing on partitioning age-related variance have indicated that large proportions of the age-related effects on individual speed variables are shared with age-related effects on other variables. Although these theoretical ideas and analytical procedures are fairly new, they may be relevant to a variety of psychophysiological or neurobiological variables.

Section snippets

Relations to age

Speed variables have been of great interest to researchers concerned with aging because they are frequently found to have moderate to large relations with age across the period of adulthood. To illustrate, a recent meta-analysis of age–speed correlations for perceptual speed and reaction time variables reported in Verhaeghen and Salthouse (1997) revealed that the weighted-average correlation was 0.52. This value corresponds to what Cohen (1988) refers to as a large effect, and thus it is not

Moderators of age relations on speed

What factors alter the relations of age on measures of speed, in the sense of leading to interactions with age? Because of space limitations only three potential moderators will be considered here, although many more could obviously be examined (for additional discussion of moderators of age-related slowing see reviews by Salthouse, 1985, Cerella, 1990, Bashore, 1993, Birren and Fisher, 1995).

Health status has received the greatest interest as a potential moderator of age–speed relations

Interpretation of interactions

As just noted, the lack of significant interactions in studies examining the effects of various manipulations in age-comparative studies has frequently been interpreted as evidence for the absence of specific or unique age-related influences on the critical process. However, this interpretation has been questioned by Salthouse and Coon (1994), who suggested that from an individual differences perspective a conclusion that a separate process is involved requires evidence that the measure

Analytical methods

Many speculations have been advanced about the factors contributing to adult age differences in particular speed variables. For example, one of the issues that has been debated with respect to certain reaction time tasks is whether the age differences are primarily attributable to processes associated with stimulus encoding, or to processes associated with response, selection and execution. Although this micro level of analysis is useful, it is also important to examine the phenomenon from a

What do scores on speed variables represent?

Although the question of what speed variables represent appears quite straightforward, it is unlikely to have a simple answer. One reason is that all variables have multiple determinants, and there are probably few theoretical constructs that can be completely assessed by a single variable. That is, it is probably the case that most variables are influenced by more than one theoretical construct, and that most constructs are broader than what can be represented by a single variable. Therefore,

Relations of speed to other cognitive variables

Because of its strong relations to age and its apparently simple nature, there has been considerable interest in how speed might be involved in the age relations on other cognitive variables. One manner in which this question has been addressed is by conducting analyses in which speed variables are included along with variables reflecting higher-order cognition such as memory, reasoning, and spatial abilities. Various types of statistical control and path analysis procedures can then be

Relevance to psychophysiological research

This article has briefly reviewed research on adult age-related effects on measures of processing speed. The evidence clearly indicates that increased age is associated with slower performance in a wide range of speeded tasks, although there are still vigorous debates with respect to the degree to which age-related slowing is specific to particular processes or also reflects broader and more general influences. Analyses attempting to distinguish shared and unique age-related effects with

Acknowledgements

Much of the research described in this article was supported by NIA Grant R37 6826.

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View full text

Aging and measures of processing speed

Abstract

Section snippets

Relations to age

Moderators of age relations on speed

Interpretation of interactions

Analytical methods

What do scores on speed variables represent?

Relations of speed to other cognitive variables

Relevance to psychophysiological research

Acknowledgements

Personality Individual Differences

Dev. Rev.

Intelligence

On mental multiplication and age

Psychol. Aging

Age differences in mental multiplication: evidence for peripheral but not central decrements

J. Gerontol. Psychol. Sci.

A comparison of the factor structure of processing speed for younger and older adults: testing the assumptions of measurement equivalence across age groups

Psychol. Aging

Differential effects of aging on the neurocognitive functions subserving speeded mental processing

Aging and speed of behavior: possible consequences for psychological functioning

Ann. Rev. Psychol.

Cognitive sets, speed and accuracy of performance in the elderly

Generalized slowing in Brinley plots

J. Gerontol. Psychol. Sci.

Acquiring skill at mental calculation in adulthood: a task decomposition

J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.

Interrelations of age, health, and speed

J. Gerontol. Psychol. Sci.

Interrelations of age, self-reported health, speed, and memory

Psychol. Aging

Toward an understanding of age-related memory and visual search effects

J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.

Brinley plots and theories of aging: the explicit, muddled, and implicit debates

J. Gerontol. Psychol. Sci.

Age differences and changes in reaction time: the Baltimore longitudinal study

J. Gerontol. Psychol. Sci.

Cognitive addition: strategy choice and speed-of-processing differences in young and elderly adults

Psychol. Aging

Simple and complex mental subtraction: strategy choice and speed-of-processing differences in younger and older adults

Psychol. Aging

Are East Asian versus American differences in arithmetical ability a recent phenomenon?

Dev. Psychol.

Experimental evidence for differential slowing in the lexical and nonlexical domains

Aging Neuropsychol. Cognit.

Converging evidence for domain-specific slowing from multiple nonlexical tasks and multiple analytic methods

J. Gerontol. Psychol. Sci.

Aging and individual differences in the development of skilled memory search performance

Psychol. Aging

Apprehension, memory and fluid intelligence decline in adulthood

Res. Aging

Changes in cognitive function in a population sample

Commentary (on Salthouse, 1992)

Hum. Dev.