Increased age is associated with lower scores in many cognitive tests, but interpretation of those results is based on the assumption that the measurement at different ages is equivalent, such that the differences reflect quantitative rather than qualitative changes. The assumption of measurement equivalence was investigated by comparing adult age differences in the relations among alternative ...

The effects of aging on alerting, orienting, and executive function were examined with the use of the Attention Network Task, which combines the Posner spatial cuing task and the Eriksen flanker task into a single procedure. We found that older adults showed significantly less alerting than young adults in response to a warning cue, although there were no age differences in orienting or executi...

Older adults consistently report having fewer close and fewer problematic social ties than do younger adults. Yet, prior studies have not explicitly examined associations between the availability of living relatives and the nature of family ties in later life. One hundred sixty-four individuals ages 13 to 99 described their networks of close and problematic social ties. Then they provided infor...

The last 10 years of research on adult hand preference patterns have generated a controversy over the meaning of the difference in the incidence rates of left- and right-hand preference in older adult samples (> 60 years old) when compared to samples of younger individuals (< 30 years old). Age differences in hand preference prevalence often are studied with large, cross-sectional age samples; ...

Old adults' tendency to rely on information present in the environment rather than internal representations has been frequently noted, but is not well understood. The fade-out paradigm provides a useful model situation to study this internal-to-external shift across the life span: Subjects need to transition from an initial, cued task-switching phase to a fade-out phase where only 1 task remain...

Most men marry younger women. This has been attributed to men selecting young women due to their high reproductive value and women preferring older men due to their wealth and high social status. Such mate preferences have been suggested to be adaptive, but despite a flourishing number of studies on the mate selection patterns themselves, little is still known of their actual fitness consequenc...

Remote Internet voting places the control and secrecy of the immediate voting environment on the shoulder of the individual voter but it also turns voting into yet another on-line activity thus endangering the well-known social nature of voting and possibly reducing the crucial sense of civic duty that is important for a healthy democracy. There is however a complete lack of evidence to what de...

A novel definition of the divided difference is shown to lead most readily to the standard basic properties of the divided difference.

How does cognitive control change with age, and what are the processes underlying these changes? This question has been extensively studied using versions of the task-switching paradigm, which allow participants to actively prepare for the upcoming task (Kray, Eber, & Karbach, 2008). Little is known, however, about age-related changes in this ability across the life span when there is no opport...