In comparison to young adults, middle-aged and old people show lower scores in intelligence tests and slower response times in elementary cognitive tasks. Whether these well-documented findings can both be attributed to a general cognitive slow-down across the life-span has become subject to debate in the last years. The drift diffusion model can…

Examines age-related predictive relationships among an array of psychometric intellectual ability markers and text recall performance. Women from three age groups (ranging from 21 to 78 years) read and recalled four narratives at three delay intervals and completed a battery of intellectual ability tests. (Author/CB)

Study replicates and extends the results obtained by Attig and Hasher (1980) in finding null effects for adult age variation and instructional variation on a relative frequency judgment task. Finds nonsignificant covariation for both young and elderly adults between judgment proficiency and paired-associate learning proficiency. (Author)

Compares education matched young brain-damaged, young nonbrain-damaged, old brain-damaged and old nonbrain-damaged groups on a battery of measures of cognitive, perceptual, and motor skills. By factor analysis, the 26 original measures were reduced to four, called nonverbal memory, language ability, motor ability, and psychomotor problem solving.…

Groups of middle-aged and elderly men and women were compared on three problem solving tasks, including written problems, the 20-questions procedure, and problems administered on a Heuristic Evaluation Problem Programmer. (MS)

A study looked for age differences in the quality of responses to the Life Review Task (LRT), studied the LRT itself as a tool for exploring wisdom and intellectual functioning in adulthood, and considered personality characteristics and life experience as alternative predictors of response quality. Sixty-three West German women of different ages…

The author reviews cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on the status of intelligence in the aging, and finds conflicting conclusions: (1) intelligence does decline as persons grow older; (2) only some aspects decline while others improve; and (3) intelligence does not decline. Certain factors are adduced to suggest that such…

Army alpha longitudinal data on the same 96 males tested in 1919, 1950, and 1960 were analyzed in addition to data on 123 undergraduates tested in 1972-4. Young adults in 1919 and 1970 were similar. Results suggest that traditional factor analysis taxonomies for young adults misrepresent elderly persons. (Author/CP)

Concludes "that the one seemingly serious effort of Baltes and Schaie to contest the points of the Horn-Donaldson criticisms only brings us around to the same sad conclusion: that no matter how one looks at the Schaie data, it suggests that, on the average, there is age decline in many important abilities of intelligence." (Author/JM)

The selected bibliography contains about 400 references taken from a keysort file of more than 45,000 references, compiled from commercially available data bases and published sources, relevant to gerontology. Those of questionable accuracy were checked or deleted during the verification process. Most references are in English and were selected…

Although maladaptive and compulsive behaviors are increasingly well-described in young persons with Prader-Willi syndrome, it is unclear how these problems manifest in older adults with this syndrome. In Part I, I compared maladaptive and compulsive behaviors in 45 older adults with Prader-Willi syndrome (ages 30 to 50 years) to 195 children,…