AGING AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTION SKILLS - AN EXAMINATION OF A COMMUNITY-DWELLING OLDER ADULT-POPULATION

The purpose of the present study was to employ the Tower of Hanoi task to the study of possible changes in executive function skills in olde r adults. The study used a quasi-experimental design, with age group ( i.e., young adult, young elderly, or older elderly), being the indepen dent variable in examining performance differences between younger and older adults. Data were analyzed cross-sectionally by age group. Nine teen elderly men and women comprised two groups; nine Young Elderly wi th an average age of 65 years and ten Older Elderly with an average ag e of 75 pars; Two men and ten women served as a Young Adult comparison group having an average age of 19 years. Performance on the Tower of Hanoi was measured by efficiency scores (number of trials to consecuti ve solutions), frequency of error types, self-correction scores (compl eting the gear configuration in twenty or fewer moves after committing an error precluding a ''correct'' solution), and error perseveration (committing the same error on two consecutive trials of a problem). An alysis of variance and chi-squared tests suggested similar executive c apacities among the 9 young adult and the 8 young elderly participants as compared to their 7 older elderly peers on the 3-disk task. Howeve r, on the if-disk task where problem complexity increased by the addit ion of another disk and longer move sequences, young adult participant s showed superior performance on the average than either young elderly or older elderly participants. Although the present study is limited by the small sample size and the use of cross-sectional analyses to ex amine age differences, these findings are consistent with the hypothes is of age differences in executive function.