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7 - Aging and Varieties of Cognitive Control: A Review of Meta-Analyses on Resistance to Interference, Coordination, and Task Switching, and an Experimental Exploration of Age-Sensitivity in the Newly Identified Process of Focus Switching

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2010

By
Paul Verhaeghen ,
John Cerella ,
Kara L. Bopp  and
Chandramallika Basak
Edited by
Randall W. Engle ,
Grzegorz Sedek ,
Ulrich von Hecker  and
Daniel N. McIntosh
Paul Verhaeghen
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Center for Health and Behavior, Syracuse University, 430 Huntington Hall, Syracuse, NY 13210
John Cerella
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Center for Health and Behavior, Syracuse University, 430 Huntington Hall, Syracuse, NY 13210
Kara L. Bopp
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Road, Clinton, NY 13323
Chandramallika Basak
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Center for Health and Behavior, Syracuse University, 430 Huntington Hall, Syracuse, NY 13210
Randall W. Engle
Affiliation:
Georgia Institute of Technology
Grzegorz Sedek
Affiliation:
Warsaw School of Social Psychology and Polish Academy of Sciences
Ulrich von Hecker
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
Daniel N. McIntosh
Affiliation:
University of Denver
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Summary

Adult age differences favoring the young have been demonstrated in a wide variety of tasks of fluid intelligence. Such age-sensitive tasks include (among many others): simple reaction times and choice reaction times, working memory tasks, tests of episodic memory, tests of spatial and reasoning abilities, mental rotation, and visual search performance (for exhaustive reviews, see e.g., Kausler, 1991; Salthouse, 1985, 1991; note that performance on other tasks, such as vocabulary measures, does not show negative age effects; e.g., Salthouse, 1991; Verhaeghen, 2003). The challenge for cognitive aging as a field is to identify the basic changes responsible for these declines. Given that the deficits are so widespread across the cognitive system, it is reasonable to assume that a limited number of basic mechanisms may explain a large number of the deficits.

It is no surprise, then, that much of the research on cognitive aging has centered on the investigation of the age effects of so-called cognitive primitives, that is, variables that influence the cognitive system without themselves being reducible to other psychological constructs. For a long time, the dominant theory in the field pertained to the influence of processing speed (Salthouse, 1991, 1996; for a meta-analysis, see Verhaeghen & Salthouse, 1997). This hypothesis views cognition as being driven by a processing rate and asserts that this rate is slower in older adults than in younger adults. More recently, the attention of the field has been drawn toward more process-specific accounts.

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Cognitive Limitations in Aging and Psychopathology , pp. 160 - 189
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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