M. Brennan et al., AGING AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTION SKILLS - AN EXAMINATION OF A COMMUNITY-DWELLING OLDER ADULT-POPULATION, Perceptual and motor skills, 84(3), 1997, pp. 1187-1197
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.