Variation in task complexity and adult age differences in frequency-of-occurrence judgments

Abstract

Young adult and elderly subjects were contrasted in performance on a relative frequency judgment task under intentional and incidental instructions and with and without performance on an ancillary case-monitoring task. In agreement with earlier studies, null effects were found for instructional variation and for the Age by Instructions interaction. Frequency judgment scores were adversely affected by ancillary task performance. However, the adverse effect was no greater for the elderly subjects than for the young subjects, in agreement with the hypothesis that the encoding of frequency information is insensitive to age changes. Unlike earlier studies, the young subjects were superior overall to the elderly subjects in frequency judgment accuracy. The age difference was attributed to an age-sensitive effortful retrieval process that is operative even on relative frequency judgment tasks and is related to level of fluid intelligence.