Parallel

Preprint from the chapter published in T. Perfect and E. Maylor (Eds.),

Models of cognitive aging

, Oxford University Press, 2000This paper is an earlier version. It does not exactly replicate the final version publishedIt is not the copy of record.© OUP

The Parallels in Beauty’s Brow:Time-Accuracy Functions

and their Implications for Cognitive Aging TheoriesPaul VerhaeghenSyracuse University(Chapter published in T. Perfect and E. Maylor (Eds.),

Models of cognitive aging

, Oxford University Press, 2000)1

Nativity, once in the main of light,Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight, And Time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth, And delves the parallels in beauty's brow.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXCognitive aging is not a field lacking in theoretical efforts. On the contrary, we may besuffering from too many theories. In his 1992 review of the field, Salthouse concluded, in what perhaps was a slight overstatement, that ‘there appear to be nearly as many explanations or interpretations of [age-related] deficits as there are published articles’ (p. 323). Most of thesetheories operate on a micro-level, that is, they pertain to only a small range of phenomena. Itseems that what we need is not more theories, but a more integrated theory, that is, a set of propositions that explains more than a narrow collection of data through a limited set of mechanisms. Some such grand theories of aging have been proposed in the past (e.g., Cerella,Poon, & Williams, 1980; Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Myerson, Hale, Wagstaff, Poon, & Smith,1990; Salthouse, 1996), but these remain largely controversial (see, for instance, recentcontroversies in the Journals of Gerontology regarding generalized-slowing theories of aging,Cerella, 1994; Fisk & Fisher, 1994; Myerson, Wagstaff, & Hale, 1994; Perfect, 1994; or regarding the inhibition account of aging, Burke, 1997; McDowd, 1997; Zacks & Hasher,1997).In this chapter, I will not provide yet another well worked-out, global scheme, a grandunified theory of cognitive aging. Rather, I will take a step back by pointing at someobstructions to the generation of such a theory (paragraph 1) – namely the problems of issueisolationism, lack of a common metric across different types of research, and the peculiaritiesof the psychometrics of between-group comparisons. I will argue that a solution to the latter two problems might be found in adopting techniques that measure the dynamics of processing by examining time-accuracy functions. The time-accuracy methodology will be outlined in paragraph 2. Then, I will demonstrate that time-accuracy functions provide a common metricacross tasks, and I will show that results obtained with the technique highlight some of the problems associated with between-group comparisons, and offer some suggestions toremediate those problems (paragraph 3). In a final paragraph, I will argue that time-accuracyresearch can indeed be beneficial to the enterprise of constructing integrative theories of aging,and may thus be helpful in the development of potentially exciting Middle Way theories aboutaging. Along the way, I will provide many illustrations of applications of the techniquesadvocated, drawn from diverse fields within cognitive aging.1. Cognitive aging as a not-so-integrative enterpriseIn his 60th Sonnet, as in a number of others, Shakespeare seems mostly preoccupied with theoutwardly visible signs of aging. Indeed, developing and growing older has a powerful impacton the way a person looks, in the sense that one of the first things one seems to notice about a person (besides gender) is approximate age. I never have trouble spotting my older volunteersin the lobby of the psychology building that is usually teeming with undergraduate life. Physicalaging is a powerful characteristic that our visual system just picks up - the ‘parallels on beauty’s brow’ that Shakespeare finds so cruel being just one of its many tell-tale signs.This sheer visibility of the aging process may be part of the reason why so manytheoreticians in the field of cognitive aging opt to present their results in ways that catch theeye. The technique of Brinley plotting (Salthouse, 1978) is one such eye-catcher. In a Brinley plot (named after the researcher who was presumably the first to use this method; Brinley,2

1965), data of older adults are presented as a function of data of young adults. Many varietiesexist: one can plot mean latencies (e.g., Cerella, Poon, & Williams, 1980) or mean accuracies(e.g., Verhaeghen & Marcoen, 1993a) of a number of studies, or mean latencies of a number of tasks or conditions with the same group of participants (e.g., Hale & Myerson, 1996). Theresulting graphs and accompanying statistics usually show not only that older adults are slower or less accurate than young adults, but also that performance of the two age groups is highlycorrelated. This means that within broad classes of tasks one can predict performance of agroup of older subjects quite well simply from knowing the performance of a group of youngsubjects. This strongly suggests that processing differences between young and older adults arequantitative rather than qualitative in nature. The suggestion is that the nature of processing(the type of processes involved and their sequencing) is well preserved with age, but that thereare general efficiency problems. Shakespeare’s image of ‘parallels in beauty’s brow’ can thus betaken at a more metaphorical level, as denoting parallelism in cognitive processes betweenyoung and older adults.Of course, as pointed out by Cerella (1990, p. 215), this parallelism ‘probably cannot betested rigorously’, which is the reason why this researcher labels it an axiom (the‘correspondence axiom’, p. 215), rather than a hypothesis - some element of belief is involved.Consequently, the conclusion of parallelism is not the conclusion that everyone derives fromthe literature (e.g., Smith, 1996). Also, the technique of Brinley plotting itself has recentlycome under close scrutiny (e.g., Fisk & Fisher, 1994; Perfect, 1994). Nevertheless, the modelof a generalized, quantitative decline in performance with advancing age seems to provide agood null-hypothesis (Cerella, 1991; Myerson & Hale, 1993). One challenge cognitive agingresearchers could set for themselves is to prove Cerella and the Bard wrong and denounce the parallelism axiom as an oversimplification. One then has to show evidence for non-parallelism,that is, either demonstrate the existence of qualitative differences between performance of young and older adults or demonstrate the existence of different kinds or levels of parallelism – that is, show that performance of young and older adults is different in nature or that agedifferences are meaningfully larger on some subset of tasks than on others.One particular type of research aimed at proving the parallelism assumption wrong can belabeled

interactionism

, after the favored method of analysis for this endeavor. Interactioniststudies are designed to locate age differences in specific well-circumscribed processes. Theminimal design of an interactionist study is this: A group of young adults and a group of older adults is confronted with some baseline task and with a manipulated version of that task. If aninteraction is found between age and condition, meaning that age differences are not identicalacross the two conditions, this interaction is interpreted as evidence for the age-sensitivity of particular postulated processes making the difference between the two conditions. For instance, assume one presents young and older adults with a list of words and asks them in a baseline condition to count the number of letters in each word (a ‘shallow’ condition), and in acritical condition to generate an associate for each word (a ‘deep’ condition). After some timethe research participants are asked to recall as many words from the list as they canrememember. Typically, one will observe that participants recall more words in the deepcondition (this is the well-known levels-of-processing effect, Craik & Lockhart, 1972). When itis found that the age difference is smaller in the shallow condition, one infers that older adultshave a particular deficit in the types of processes involved in deep processing of information.Further theoretical meaning might then be attached to that inference. For instance, if onesupposes that such processes requires more attentional resources, then the conclusion would be that older adults have less of these resources available. When the age difference is smallestin the deep condition, one might infer, for instance, that older adults suffer from a productiondeficit, that is, that they are capable of encoding material in a effective way if guided towardsthat way of encoding, but do not spontaneously engage in effective operations. Finding no age3