Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 52, Issue 2 P81-P90, Copyright © 1997 by The Gerontological Society of America
Age differences in mental multiplication: evidence for peripheral but not central decrements
PA Allen, AF Smith, KA Jerge and H Vires-Collins
Department of Psychology, Cleveland State University, USA. r0500@vmcms.edu
This study reports two mental multiplication experiments that were designed
to measure age differences in central and peripheral processes. Experiment
1 varied task type (verification vs production), and Experiment 2 varied
exposure duration (presentation until response, 600 ms, and 300 ms) on a
production task. Neither experiment showed evidence of age differences in
central processes (e.g., retrieval speed); however, there was some evidence
of a peripheral-process (e.g., encoding) decrement for older adults.
Specifically, there were no Age X Problem Size interactions for either
experiment. Experiment 2 revealed decreasing age differences as problem
difficulty increased. Indeed, for the 300-ms exposure duration, there were
no age differences in RT or error rate. These results suggest that the
magnitude of age differences in central processing speed are significantly
less extreme than are age differences for peripheral processing speed for
this type of mental arithmetic task. Also, older adults, in general, may
have a higher skill level for basic fact retrieval in mental arithmetic
than do young adults.
