Skilled performance: Effects of adult age and experience on elementary processes.

Abstract

SUMMARY Despite a general neglect in contemporary research of the role of practice on the performance of simple components of skill, considerable evidence indicates that experience leads to substantial improvement in detection, discrimination, ani speeded classification. One goal of the present research was to identify the mechanisms responsible for practice-related improvement in such elementary tasks. A second goal was to determine whether there are adult age differences in the magnitude of practicerelated improvement on simple perceptual and cognitive skills or in the mechanisms used to achieve that improvement. Eight young adults (ages 19 to 27 years) and 8 older adults (ages 62 to 73 years) performed four simple tasks for 5l experimental sessions. On several sessions the subjects received qualitatively or quantitatively different stimuli to determine the mechanisms responsible for improvement. A concurrent reaction-time task was also performed at three different periods to assess the level of residual capacity after various amounts of practice. The results were interpreted as suggesting that improvement is due to shifts in the type of information being processed, in the identity or sequence of processing operations, and in the attention requirements of the task. A model incorporating these mechanisms is proposed and its application to the data is discussed. Age differences persisted on nearly every performance measure throughout all levels of practice. Moreover, there was little evidence that young and old subjects were qualitatively different in the manner in which they performed the tasks. It is suggested that the major difference between young and old adults on simple perceptual and cognitive tasks is the rate of processing nearly all types of information.