VerhaeghenCerella(AlwinHoferBook)

Verhaeghen & Cerella – page 1Everything We Know About Aging and Response Times:A Meta-Analytic IntegrationPaul Verhaeghen and John CerellaSyracuse University

Hofer, S. M., & Alwin, D. F. (Eds.).

The Handbook of Cognitive Aging: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

AcknowledgmentsThis research was supported in part by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (AG-16201).We thank Lieve De Meersman, Martin Sliwinski, David Steitz, and Christina Wasylyshyn for their contributions to the original research.

Verhaeghen & Cerella – page 2Older adults take longer to process information than younger adults. It has long been known thatthe increase in response time (RT) is monotonic with adult age. In a large meta-analysis of studies using 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. Cerella & Hale (1994) estimated that the average 70-year oldfunctions at the speed of the average 8-year old – a large effect.It also appears that this age-related slowing occurs in a wide variety of tasks, implicatinga wide variety of cognitive systems: Memory search, visual search, lexical decision, mentalrotation, speech discrimination, digit-symbol substitution, are but a few of the tasks that haveconsistently been found to yield age-related deficits in response times (see Kausler, 1991, andSalthouse, 1991, for excellent reviews of the deficits observed in the literature). A key and stillunsettled question in the field of cognitive aging is: How many explanatory mechanisms or dimensions are necessary for an adequate description of age-related slowing?A first school of thought tends towards strong reductionism. A monograph that bestexemplifies this tendency is Salthouse’s 1991

Theoretical perspectives on cognitive aging

. Thisresearch program seeks to establish a single mechanism as governing aging, identified as either processing speed (e.g., Salthouse, 1996), the neuromodulation effects underlying it (Braver &Barch, 2002; Li, Lindenberger, & French, 2000), or even a common cause linking cognitivechange to perceptual/motor processes (e.g., Lindenberger & Baltes, 1997). Researchers workingin this framework have favored a correlational, individual-differences approach in which a set of antecedent variables – often measured by a small set of tasks assumed to tap a relatively broad psychometric factor – is used to predict age differences (in a cross-sectional design) or agechanges (in a longitudinal design) in some aspect of cognition. The current aspiration among

Verhaeghen & Cerella – page 3reductionists is of cross-level unification, building explanations for cognitive aging from the bottom up, starting with gross changes in brain structure or neuronal functioning (see, e.g., thestrong claims in Li, Lindenberger, & Frensch, 2000, and Park, Polk, Mikels, Taylor, &Marshuetz, 2001).A second school of thought is well represented by Kausler’s 1991 monograph

Experimental psychology, cognition, and human aging

. The explanatory preference here istowards high precision, leading researchers to measure aging at the level of information- processing components. The emergent current in this process-oriented camp is computational – starting with mathematical models from cognitive psychology, the goal is to isolate those parameters whose modification reproduces the observed pattern of age effects (see, e.g., thestrong positions taken by Byrne, 1998; Kahana, Howard, Zaromb, & Wingfield, 2002; Meyer,Glass, Mueller, Seymour, & Kieras, 2001; and Ratcliff, Spieler, & McKoon, 2000). The preferreddata are experimental, comparing performance (latency or accuracy) between a baseline task anda version in which the process of interest is manipulated.These two approaches to cognitive aging are opposite in many ways. One broadcasts itseffects at a macro-level and aims at breath; the other focuses its effects at a micro-level, and aimsat depth. The first engenders the impression that cognitive aging is orderly and simple; thesecond that it is diverse and messy. A third orientation has evolved at a meso-level: Aging isconceptualized in more detail than in macro-research, but at a resolution coarser than obtained inmicro-research (e.g., Hale & Myerson, 1996; Verhaeghen et al., 2002). The approach here has been to examine large data sets for communalities in the age effects from tasks thought torepresent similar kinds of processes, and for dissimilarities in the age effects from tasks differingin kind. Communalities are expressed as common “slowing factors” for related tasks;