Age Differences in Overlapping-Task Performance: Evidence for Efficient Parallel Processing in Older Adults

• Published in: Psychology and aging 2002-09, Vol.17 (3), p.505-519
• Main Authors: Allen, Philip A, Lien, Mei-Ching, Murphy, Martin D, Sanders, Raymond E, Judge, Katherine S, McCann, Robert S
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Adult. Elderly; Adults; Age Differences; Age Factors; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Aging; Aging - physiology; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition Disorders - diagnosis; Cognition Disorders - epidemiology; Developmental psychology; Discrimination (Psychology); Elderly people; Experiments; Female; Form Perception; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Human Channel Capacity; Humans; Intersensory Processes; Male; Middle Aged; Neuropsychological Tests; Older people; Parallel processing; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time; Severity of Illness Index; Task performance; Task Performance and Analysis
• ISSN: 0882-7974; 1939-1498
• DOI: 10.1037/0882-7974.17.3.505

Two psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted to examine overlapping processing in younger and older adults. A shape discrimination task (triangle or rectangle) for Task 1 (T 1 ) and a lexical-decision task (word or nonword) for Task 2 (T 2 ) were used. PRP effects, response time for T 2 increasing as stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) decreased, were obtained for both age groups. The effect of word frequency on T 2 was smaller at the short SOA than at the long SOA, reflecting slack effects, which were larger for older than younger adults in both experiments. These results suggest that older adults can perform lexical access of T 2 in parallel with the processing of T 1 at least as efficiently as younger adults.