Aging Effects on Symbolic Number Comparison: No Deceleration of Numerical Information Retrieval but More Conservative Decision-Making
Aging Effects on Symbolic Number Comparison: No Deceleration of Numerical Information Retrieval but More Conservative Decision-Making
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DOI：
10.1037/pag0000272
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发表时间：
2019-02
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Dennis Reike;W. Schwarz
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Dennis Reike;W. Schwarz
尽管许多认知任务显示出明显的衰老效应，即使在健康的老年人中，其他任务似乎对衰老更具弹性。最近的一些研究表明，数字比较可能是一种在整个生命周期中保持不变的能力。我们调查了年轻人（19-39岁; n = 39）和健康老年人（65-79岁; n = 39）相当详细地比较个位数的能力，分析了他们反应时间的准确性以及平均值和方差，以及其他几个公认的数字比较标志。使用一个最近的综合过程模型，该模型对数字比较的许多方面进行了粗略的定量说明（Reike &施瓦茨，2016），我们在数字比较任务中解决了老年人与年轻人比较的两个基本问题：（a）就不同的准确程度，适当地修正速度量度（老年参与者比年轻参与者更准确），以及（B）一方面区分一般感觉和运动减慢，与检索和比较数值幅度表示的效率的特定年龄相关的下降相反。我们的研究结果代表了强有力的证据表明，健康的老年人比较幅度作为年轻人有效，当效率的措施是不受污染的战略速度准确性权衡和感官和运动阶段，不涉及数值比较本身。与此同时，老年人的目标是一个显着更高的准确性水平（风险厌恶），这必然会缩短处理时间，他们也表现出有据可查的感觉和/或运动功能的普遍下降。
Whereas many cognitive tasks show pronounced aging effects, even in healthy older adults, other tasks seem more resilient to aging. A small number of recent studies suggests that number comparison is possibly one of the abilities that remain unaltered across the life span. We investigated the ability to compare single-digit numbers in young (19–39 years; n = 39) and healthy older (65–79 years; n = 39) adults in considerable detail, analyzing accuracy as well as mean and variance of their response time, together with several other well-established hallmarks of numerical comparison. Using a recent comprehensive process model that parsimoniously accounts quantitatively for many aspects of number comparison (Reike & Schwarz, 2016), we address two fundamental problems in the comparison of older to young adults in numerical comparison tasks: (a) to adequately correct speed measures for different levels of accuracy (older participants were significantly more accurate than young participants), and (b) to distinguish between general sensory and motor slowing on the one hand, as opposed to a specific age-related decline in the efficiency to retrieve and compare numerical magnitude representations. Our results represent strong evidence that healthy older adults compare magnitudes as efficiently as young adults, when the measure of efficiency is uncontaminated by strategic speed–accuracy trade-offs and by sensory and motor stages that are not related to numerical comparison per se. At the same time, older adults aim at a significantly higher accuracy level (risk aversion), which necessarily prolongs processing time, and they also show the well-documented general decline in sensory and/or motor functions.