Aging and Varieties of Cognitive Control33jc

Aging and cognitive control – page 1Aging 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 focusswitchingPaul Verhaeghen, John Cerella, Kara L. Bopp, and Chandramallika Basak Syracuse UniversityChapter to appear in:

Cognitive Limitations in Aging and Psychopathology: Attention, Working Memory, and Executive Functions

Edited by:Randall W. Engle (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)Grzegorz Sedek (Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Poland)Ulrich von Hecker (Cardiff University, UK)Daniel N. McIntosh (Denver University, USA)

Aging and cognitive control – page 2Adult 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 timesand choice reaction times, working memory tasks, tests of episodic memory, tests of spatial andreasoning abilities, mental rotation, and visual search performance (for exhaustive reviews, seee.g., Kausler, 1991; Salthouse, 1985, 1991; note that performance on other tasks, such asvocabulary 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 isreasonable 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 theinvestigation of the age effects of so-called cognitive primitives, that is, variables that influencethe cognitive system without themselves being reducible to other psychological constructs. For along 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 hypothesisviews 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 towardsmore process-specific accounts. The currently active theories of this sort postulate age-relateddeficits that are specific to particular basic control processes in working memory.More specifically, three types of control processes have been researched extensively inthe field of cognitive aging (see Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, & Howerter, 2000 for aclassification of control processes). First, resistance to interference, also known as inhibitorycontrol, has been a central explanatory construct in aging theories throughout the 1990s (e.g.,

Aging and cognitive control – page 3Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Hasher, Zacks, & May, 1999; for a computational approach, see Braver & Barch, 2002). Inhibition theory casts resistance to interference as a true cognitive primitiveand posits an age-related breakdown in this resistance. A breakdown with aging would lead tomental clutter in older adult’s working memory, thereby limiting its functional capacity, and perhaps also its speed of operation. Second, age-related deficits have been posited in the abilityto coordinate distinct tasks or distinct processing streams. Some of the attendant literature pertains to dual-task performance (e.g., Hartley & Little, 1999; McDowd & Shaw, 2000), but theconcept has also received some attention in the working memory literature (e.g., Mayr & Kliegl,1993; Verhaeghen, Kliegl, & Mayr, 1997). This theory typically sees age differences incoordination as independent of age differences in speed, that is, coordination is considered amechanism that operates over and beyond the effects of mere slowing, and is presumablynecessary to explain age-related differences in more complex tasks. Third, the late 1990s andearly 2000s has seen a surge in the number of publications devoted to aging and task switching(e.g., Mayr, Spieler, & Kliegl, 2001). Much like the coordination theory, this work considers agedifferences in task switching as additional to other age-related deficits that might exist in thecognitive system. A fourth factor, working memory updating, has been investigated relativelyrarely in an aging context (e.g., Van der Linden, Brédart, & Beerten, 1994); we therefore touchon this process very briefly here. Claims for these process-specific deficits are mainly based onexperimental evidence, that is, studies in which performance on conditions with a high demandfor control processes is contrasted with performance on baseline conditions with a low demandfor control, and the researcher tests whether this contrast is larger in older than in younger adults.These different views on the major causes of aging have been developed largely inindependence from one other. Therefore, the experimental work pertaining to these several