DO ABILITY PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIPS DIFFERENTIATE AGE AND PRACTICE EFFECTS IN VISUAL-SEARCH

Relationships between abilities and performance in visual search were investigated for young and old adults. Ss received extensive practice on category search task. A consistent version allowed development of a n automatic attention response; a varied version allowed general perfo rmance improvements. Transfer conditions assessed learning. General ab ility, induction, semantic knowledge, working memory, perceptual speed , semantic memory access, and psychomotor speed were assessed. LISREL models revealed that general ability and semantic memory access predic ted initial performance for both ages. Improvements on both the consis tent and varied tasks were predicted by perceptual speed. Ability-perf ormance relationships indexed performance changes but were not predict ive of learning (i.e., automatic process vs. general efficiency). Qual itative differences in the ability-transfer models suggest age differe nces in learning.