An interpretation of age-related differences in letter-matching performance

Abstract

Comparisons were made of the response latencies of old (mean age = 69.2 years) and young (mean age = 26.8 years) subjects on simple and choice reaction time (RT) tasks and "physical identity" (PI) and "name identity" (NI) trials of a letter-matching task. Young subjects were faster than old subjects on all tasks, and the absolute difference between groups increased with processing complexity (simple RT < choice RT< PI