Converging evidence that visuospatial cognition is more age-sensitive thanverbal cognition

In 3 separate experiments, the same samples of young and older adults were tested on verbal and visuospatial processing speed tasks, verbal and visuos patial working memory tasks, and verbal and visuospatial paired-associates learning tasks. In Experiment 1. older adults were generally slower than yo ung adults on all speeded tasks, but age-related slowing was much more pron ounced on visuospatial tasks than on verbal tasks. In Experiment 2, older a dults showed smaller memory spans than young adults in general, bur memory for locations showed a greater age difference than memory for letters. In E xperiment 3, older adults had greater difficulty learning novel information than young adults overall, but older adults: showed greater deficits learn ing visuospatial than verbal information. Taken together, the differential deficits observed on both speeded and unspeeded tasks strongly suggest that visuospatial cognition is generally more affected by aging than verbal cog nition.