The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of practice on simple reaction time (RT), movement time (MT), and response consistency for two arm-reaching tasks of graded complexity in younger and older adults. Forty subjects, 20 younger adults (age range = 20-29 years) and 20 older adults (age range = 60-82 years), were randomly subdivided into practice and control groups. All subjects we...

The current study examined age differences in the association between daily negative affect, average negative affect, and diurnal cortisol among participants from the National Study of Daily Experiences (N = 1,423; age range: 33-84 years). Across four consecutive days, participants reported the negative emotions they experienced and provided four saliva samples per day, from which cortisol was ...

While older adults face various deficits in binding items in memory, they are often able to remember information that is deemed important. In Experiment 1, we examined how younger and older adults remember medication interactions of varying severity. There were no age differences in overall memory accuracy, but older adults' performance depended on the severity of the interactions (such that th...

This article describes both normative changes and individual differences in the gender composition of girls' and boys' friendship networks across adolescence and predicts variations in these changes. It also examines changes in the characteristics (context, age difference, closeness, and support) of same- and other-sex friendships in the network. Girls and boys (N=390) were interviewed annually...

This study investigated whether young and older adults vary in their beliefs about the impact of various mitigating factors on age-related memory decline. Eighty young (ages 18-23) and 80 older (ages 60-82) participants reported their beliefs about their own memory abilities and the strategies that they use in their everyday lives to attempt to control their memory. Participants also reported t...

Two experiments are reported that compared younger and older adults on their performance of two bimanual temporal coordination tasks at varying movement speeds. In many cases, older adults performed as well as younger adults at all speeds of an in-phase coordination pattern and at slow speeds of an anti-phase pattern for both coordination accuracy and stability. Age differences tended to emerge...

Three studies explored whether younger and older adults' free recall performance can benefit from prior exposure to distraction that becomes relevant in a memory task. Participants initially read stories that included distracting text. Later, they studied a list of words for free recall, with half of the list consisting of previously distracting words. When the memory task was indirect in its u...

In order to test the hypothesis that recognition is a developmentally stable component of the memory system, age differences in recognition of faces were examined while controlling for nonmemory factors that might contribute to differences between the groups. Three groups of children (mean ages: 3 years, 4 months; 4 years, 9 months: and 6 years, 11 months) and a group of college students were t...

Men universally express a preference for youth in a long-term mate, presumably an evolved desire originating from the close and recurrent statistical association between a woman's age and her residual reproductive value (future reproductive potential). As a consequence, we hypothesized a positive correlation for men (but not women) between the number of children desired and preferred spousal ag...

This article evaluates the success of Inhibitory Deficit theory in addressing two basic functions of a theory: explaining available results and predicting new findings. The review focuses on language comprehension and production, domains of cognition vulnerable to age-linked inhibitory deficits under the theory. Considerable research, however, reports remarkable age constancy in many aspects of...