Ability Of Young Adults Research Articles

Habitual sleep duration and the premature decline of aging-sensitive abilities in young adults

Groups of young habitual long-and short-sleeping college students were tested individually on Botwinick and Storandt’s Copying Digits Task. This was done as a test of the hypothesis that habitual sleep duration is directly related to level of performance on array of agingsensitive abilities. Congruent with this hypothesis, we found that our young long sleepers performed at their age level on this task, whereas the young short sleepers performed on this task as if they were in their mid-40s.

Sensory interaction, brain activity, and reading ability in young adults.

Forty-one Navy recruits were divided into two groups (HIGH versus LOW) based on reading ability. Eight channels of visual (VERP), auditory (AERP), and bimodal (BERP) event related brain potential data were analyzed in order to assess the relationship between sensory interaction and reading ability. The HIGH group showed greater VERP amplitude than did the LOW group, while the lOW group showed greater AERP and BERP amplitude than did the HIGH group. Discriminant analysis provided separation of the two groups when VERP and AERP variables were used but not BERP variables. Sensory modality interaction was assessed through the derived expression. Greatest group differences were found late in the waveform (between 300 and 400 msec) suggesting that sensory interaction also affects higher-order cognitive functioning. Distractability may partially account for the ERP differences found for the two reading groups.

Cognitive Speed and Subsequent Intellectual Development: A Longitudinal Investigation

The hypothesis that a measure of intellectual speed assessed at one point in time would predict intellectual achievement at a later point in time was evaluated with a time-lagged cross-correlational analysis, an application of causal modeling techniques. Longitudinal data for 32 males and females, tested in 1944 (mean age 19.5 years) and in 1972 (mean age 46.7 years), supported the hypothesized relationships with an associated p less than .01. The Relations Factor of the Army Alpha Examination--consisting of scores from a highly speeded simple analogies test and a short-term memory test--administered at age 20 was highly predictive of both verbal and numerical ability in middle age. The results highlight the cognitive intellectual aspect of the speed of behavior. In addition, these findings supplement Hunt's studies of the relationships between speed of cognitive processing and psychometric abilities in young adults, and emphasize the importance of cognitive speed for subsequent intellectual development. Implications for the intellectual speed hypothesis of Birren and the utilization of time-lag designs in longitudinal research are discussed.