Reaction timePaul Verhaeghen, Syracuse University

(lemma to appear in G. L. Maddox (Ed.),

The Encyclopedia of Aging, 4

edition

, Springer Verlag )

Older adults take longer to process information than younger adults. It has long been known thatthe increase in response time (RT) with age is monotonic. In a large meta-analysis on studiesusing continuous age samples, Verhaeghen and Salthouse (1997) reported an age-speedcorrelation of -.52, and Welford (1977) estimated that each additional year of adult age increaseschoice reaction time by 1.5 ms. In fact the increase is more than linear, and accelerates notablywith advancing age (Cerella & Hale, 1994; Verhaeghen & Salthouse, 1997). Cerella & Hale(1994) estimated that the average 70-year old functions at the speed of the average 8-year old – alarge effect.Slowing has obvious consequences for real-life behavior, such as applying the brakes of acar to avoid collision. Age differences in processing speed are also important because they have been found to mediate age differences in more complex aspects of cognition such as episodicmemory, reasoning, spatial ability, and general intelligence (Salthouse, 1996; for a meta-analysis,see Verhaeghen & Salthouse, 1997; for a review of longitudinal effects, see Hertzog, 2004).One technique for examining age-related slowing is to plot average response times of older adults from a single age group (roughly 60 to 75 years of age) as a function of averageresponse times of younger adults (18 to 25 years of age); this is called a ‘Brinley plot’, after Brinley (1965). Early studies using archival data from a variety of information-processing tasksshowed that the young-old relationship is well approximated by a straight line with a negativeintercept and a slope significantly larger than one. The first published analysis was done on 99data points from 18 studies; the resulting equation was RT(old) = 1.36 RT(young) – 70 ms, and

fit the data with an R

of .95 (Cerella, Poon, & Williams, 1980). The extreme regularity of thisand subsequent data sets (e.g., Cerella, 1985, 1990; Myerson, Hale, Wagstaff, Poon, & Smith,1990) gave rise to the hypothesis of ‘general slowing’, that is, the notion that all computational processes in older adults are slowed to the same degree, indexed by the slope of the Brinleyfunction (a slope of 1.36 indicates 36% slowing for older adults of the indicated age).The initial claims for general slowing were weakened as the field accumulated new data.The figure shows a Brinley plot of all studies reporting single-task latencies in the 1997-2003volumes of the journal

Psychology and Aging

(92 separate studies, 845 data points; upper left panel of the figure). The tasks used in these studies were quite diverse, including such paradigmsas simple RT, choice RT, visual search, different attentional tasks, enumeration, locationdiscrimination, and lexical decision. Although a single linear function fits the data points well(R

= .87), the fit decreases considerably when the data are restricted to tasks that yield RTs of 1000 ms or less in younger adults (R

= .67) (upper right panel). Note that the equationreproduces the 1980 Cerella et al. result closely – the data show an average of 40% slowing, anda small negative intercept of about 50 ms. Although the overall regression line has often beenused to characterize such data, it can be argued that slopes from individual studies provide a better metric (Cerella, 1985; Sliwinski & Hall, 1998). Within-study Brinley slopes conformextremely well (R

larger than

.99) to estimates derived from careful analysis of age differencesmeasured directly from information-processing rates in iterative tasks (Myerson, Adams, Hale, &Jenkins, 2003). The lower left panel shows the regression lines from each study, and the lower right panel collects the slopes of these lines in a frequency histogram. The picture that emergesdoes not point to general slowing, but rather to considerable diversity in slopes. Additionally, thefigure shows that the regression lines fan out from a point situated around the (400 ms, 450 ms)

point. 400 ms is arguably close to the value of simple manual RT for young adult subjects(Teichner & Krebs, 1974). Translating the Brinley plot to this origin eliminates the intercepts andreduces the age relationship to the slopes alone.What accounts for the heterogeneity in slopes? Clearly we must allow for between-studydifferences – sampling variance, methods variance, and the like. But part of the heterogeneityappears to be tied to differences in tasks and/or processes. Research points to four task differences that lead to replicable changes in Brinley slopes. First, slopes are smaller for sensorimotor tasks than for tasks requiring more central processing (Cerella, Poon, & Williams,1980, estimate these slopes as 1.1 and 1.6, resp.). Second, within central processing, slopes for tasks requiring lexical processing are smaller than slopes for tasks requiring visuospatial processing (Lima, Hale, & Myerson, 1991, estimate these slopes to be 1.5 and 2.0, resp.; see alsoSliwinski & Hall, 1998). Third, within (mostly) visuospatial processing, tasks requiring storageof intermediate calculations in working memory yield larger age deficits than tasks that do not(Mayr, Kliegl, & Krampe, 1996, estimate a slope of about 2.0 for tasks without working memoryinvolvement and 4.0 for tasks with). Fourth, attentional processes modulate age differences inRT, but only for tasks that divide attention (dual tasking and global task switching), and not for tasks that require selective attention (negative priming, Stroop, and local task switching)(Verhaeghen & Cerella, 2002, provide a series of meta-analyses supporting this fourth claim).The origins of age-related slowing are still being debated. Some researchers point tostrategic differences, specifically increased cautiousness which drives older adults to sacrificespeed for accuracy (e.g., Ratcliff, Thapar, & McKoon, 2001). Cautiousness or the speed-accuracyset-point can, however, be only part of the explanation. Studies that have measured completetime-accuracy functions (e.g., Kliegl et al., 1996; Verhaeghen, 2001) have found that older adults