This study demonstrated effects of age, education, and sex on complex reaction time in a large national sample (N = 3,616) with a wide range in age (32-85) and education. Participants completed speeded auditory tasks (from the MIDUS [Midlife in the U.S.] Stop and Go Switch Task) by telephone. Complexity ranged from a simple repeated task to an…

Three studies found that there was a marked increase with age from preschool to adulthood in individuals' tendency to say that persons always have some thoughts and ideas flowing through their minds. Four year olds tended to say that persons could keep their minds completely empty of ideas. (MDM)

Examined the relationship between suicidal and subsuicidal ideation in the general public and among undergraduates, utilizing a questionnaire concerning parameters of inclusive fitness, suidical ideation and experience, and attitudes toward the value of life. Analyses indicated significant moderate relationships between inclusive fitness and…

Three experiments investigated the possibility that adult age differences on block design tasks originate because of reduced efficiency with increased age in the cognitive processes associated with block manipulation. Older adults were substantially slower and less efficient than younger adults in performing tasks with minimized design…

Developmental differences in the allocation of processing capacity were examined in 32 second and sixth graders and 32 college students. (MP)

One hundred and sixty subjects ages 7, 9, 11 and 21 years judged the standard Brentano form and a dot form of the illusion of 5 trials at 30 second intervals. (LLK)

First- and sixth-grade students, as well as college- age students, were examined with a procedure that generates separate measures for storage and retrieval components of the probability of correct recall. While recall performance was found to improve with each advancing grade level, it was found that storage and retrieval processes develop at…

Investigates performance of 8, 10, 12 year olds and adults on cognitive tasks in terms of several processing-speed measures, each of which may change independently with age. Results underscore the complexity of developmental change in processing efficiency. (Author/RH)

Two experiments suggest that the empirical finding of age differences in automatic frequency processing depends on the extent to which subjects can or do strategically process task materials in a differential fashion. This interpretation is considered compatible with a modified conception of automatic encoding which views such encoding processes…

Administered a battery of psychometric ability tests to 211 undergraduates and 622 other adults ranging in age from 43 to 78. Findings were consistent with the view that speed of information processing can be an important correlate of individual differences in rates of intellectual aging and a performance-specific confound that distorts estimates…

A study examined the relative contributions of age, sex, and education to verbal and nonverbal fluency in a normal population. Sixty-seven subjects aged 12 to 71 years performed paper-and-pencil tasks proven to be dependent on the right and left hemispheric modalities of the frontal lobes. Multiple t-tests were applied to determine whether…

Several writers have suggested that changes in temporal perspective during adolescence are largely a consequence of the cognitive acquisitions held to characterize the period (i.e., emergence of formal operations reasoning). To replicate earlier research, which found little association between adolescents' formal operations reasoning and future…

Six motion projections were presented to first graders, seventh graders, and college students (N=72) in order to determine whether children can utilize the same motion parallax information as can adults. (MP)

Recent studies of contextual attributes thought to be automatic have reported deficits among the elderly, raising the question of whether automatic memory processing does require some effortful attention and if so, whether such effort is needed during encoding, storage, or retrieval. This study used a secondary task methodology to examine these…

In a visual recognition masking experiment, a target stimulus to be identified is either preceded or followed by a second stimulus called a masking stimulus. The experiments described here provide estimates of both developmental and aging differences in visual backward masking under conditions which maximize interference in the central visual…