A mental-rotation task was presented to young (18-28 years) and old (60-76
years) adults to simultaneously assess age-related changes in performance,
response monitoring and adaptive behavior. Relative to young participants,
older adults were less inclined to adjust their speed at the expense of acc
uracy. They displayed a larger number of slow errors, smaller error potenti
als (Ne and Pe), more immediate corrections of errors when detected, and a
larger speed reduction on trials following an error. The data suggest that
for older adults an increase of task complexity sometimes caused a radical
failure in determining the correct response, rather than a gradual reductio
n of efficiency. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.