Age effects on response monitoring in a mental-rotation task

A mental-rotation task was presented to young (18–28 years) and old (60–76 years) adults to simultaneously assess age-related changes in performance, response monitoring and adaptive behavior. Relative to young participants, older adults were less inclined to adjust their speed at the expense of acc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biological psychology 2000, Vol.51 (2), p.201-221
Main Authors: Band, Guido P.H, Kok, Albert
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Age Factors
Aged
Aging
Cognition - physiology
Electroencephalography
Error potentials
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Female
Humans
LRP
Male
Middle Aged
Motion Perception - physiology
Reaction Time
Response monitoring
SAT
Space life sciences
Strategy
Visual Perception - physiology
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Summary:A mental-rotation task was presented to young (18–28 years) and old (60–76 years) adults to simultaneously assess age-related changes in performance, response monitoring and adaptive behavior. Relative to young participants, older adults were less inclined to adjust their speed at the expense of accuracy. They displayed a larger number of slow errors, smaller error potentials (Ne and Pe), more immediate corrections of errors when detected, and a larger speed reduction on trials following an error. The data suggest that for older adults an increase of task complexity sometimes caused a radical failure in determining the correct response, rather than a gradual reduction of efficiency.
ISSN:0301-0511
1873-6246
DOI:10.1016/S0301-0511(99)00038-1