SUBITIZING, COUNTING, AND AGING – P. 1

Preprint from the paper that appeared in

Psychology and Aging

This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.© American Psychological Associationhttp://www.apa.org/journals/pag.html

RUNNING HEAD: SUBITIZING, COUNTING, AND AGINGSubitizing speed, subitizing range, counting speed, the Stroop effect, and aging:Capacity differences, speed equivalenceChandramallika Basak and Paul VerhaeghenSyracuse University

SUBITIZING, COUNTING, AND AGING – P. 2

AbstractThirty younger and 29 older adults were tested on reaction times for set-size of a display of 1 to9 digits. On half of the trials, the nominal value of the digits was equal to the size of the setdisplayed; on the other half, the value differed by 1 from the set size (Stroop interference). Wefound evidence for age differences in subitizing span (2.83 vs. 2.07). Once individual differencesin subitizing range were taken into account, no age differences were found in the rate of either subitizing or counting, and no individual differences were apparent in subitizing speed. Therewas no age difference in the susceptibility to the Stroop effect. The results suggest that, withadvancing age, the size of the focus of attention may shrink, but speed of access to elements inthe focus of attention may remain constant.

SUBITIZING, COUNTING, AND AGING – P. 3

Subitizing speed, subitizing range, counting speed, the Stroop effect, and aging:Capacity differences, speed equivalenceOne of the best established regularities in the field of cognitive aging is the orderly relation between latencies of older adults and those of younger adults, known since the 1980s (Cerella,1990; Cerella, Poon, & Williams, 1980; Myerson, Hale, Wagstaff, Poon, & Smith, 1990). Thisregularity can typically be captured quite well by a single highly linear function relating latenciesof older adults to corresponding latencies of younger adults. This result has led to theformulation of a general slowing hypothesis, that is, the hypothesis that a single ratio of old:young processing rates can describe slowing in central cognitive processes (e.g., Cerella, 1990,1994).The challenge for current theory and research in the field is to find exceptions to this pattern. Recently, distinct age-related slowing ratios have indeed emerged for different types or domains of tasks (Hale & Myerson, 1996; Kliegl, Mayr, & Krampe, 1994; Mayr, Kliegl, &Krampe, 1996; Myerson & Hale, 1993; Sliwinski & Hall, 1998). Such exceptions to the patternof general slowing have been termed ‘dissociations’ (Perfect & Maylor, 2000).One dissociation that has recently attracted some attention – because the direction of theeffect is counterintuitive – is the dissociation between subitizing speed and counting speed.Subitizing is the rapid, probably pre-attentive (Trick & Pylyshyn, 1994) process that allows people to immediately ‘see’ or ‘grasp’ the number of elements shown in a display, as long as thenumber of elements is very small (i.e., not more than 3 or 4 elements). Subitizing is postulated to be a parallel and near-automatic process, as reflected in very shallow reaction-time-by-set-sizeslopes – that is, 40 to 100 ms per item (Trick & Pylyshyn, 1994). When the number of elements