S. Hale et al., CONVERGING EVIDENCE FOR DOMAIN-SPECIFIC SLOWING FROM MULTIPLE NONLEXICAL TASKS AND MULTIPLE ANALYTIC METHODS, The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences, 50(4), 1995, pp. 202-211
Older and young adults were tested on eight nonlexical tasks that over
lapped extensively in complexity: disjunctive choice reaction time, li
ne-length discrimination, letter classification, shape classification,
mental rotation, visual search, abstract matching, and mental paper-f
olding. Performance on the first seven tasks was associated with equiv
alently low error rates in both groups, making it possible to directly
compare their response times (RTs) on these tasks. Consistent with do
main-specific slowing, the relationship between the RTs of the older a
dults and the RTs of the young adults was well described by a task-ind
ependent mathematical (Brinley) function. Evidence from this analysis
and from analyses based on task-specific information;processing models
leads to similar conclusions and provides converging support for gene
ral cognitive slowing in the nonlexical domain.