Healthy aging has been associated with declines in executive functioning (EF) but it remains unclear how different subprocesses of EF are affected by age and by other possibly mediating variables. The principal aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of age and processing speed on three executive functions: set-shifting, planning, and attentional control. Four age groups (20-29 years, 60-69 years, 70-79 years, and 80-89 years) were compared on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), the DKEFS Tower Test, the Conner's Continuous Performance Test, and a Letter comparison test of processing speed. Results suggested that increased age was associated with decreased performance on most of the studied executive measures, but not all EF are equally affected by age. A slowdown in processing speed mediates some, but not all, decrements in executive performance. The results are interpreted in light of recent neuroimaging data on age-related changes in brain functioning. / by Maria Beatriz Jurado Noboa. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This investigation compared achievement of boys and girls in second grade who were seven years old in June, July, and August of 1983 to the boys and girls in second grade who were eight years old in September, October, and November of 1983. The students were tested using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills using the following areas: reading, total math, and composite scores. The study also looked at the correlation of sex and age of students who had been retained in first grade. A comparison of teacher grades to standardized test scores and ability grouping was also presented. One way analysis of variance was applied to the test results. A chi square test of independence was conducted on students retained in the first grade to determine if interaction between sex and age was indicated. Older children scored higher in all three areas measured, while girls scored higher in reading. This may seem contradictory, but is not. Age was significant beyond the .05 level, while sex was significant beyond the .001 level. This difference is explained by the extremes in means for younger boys and older girls. Since first grade curriculum emphasizes reading, this gave girls a definite advantage over boys. Boys, however, scored significantly higher in math. The results indicate a need for restructuring curriculum to meet the needs of boys and girls. Younger boys in second grade scored the lowest in all areas tested, except math. These scores would have been even more significant if the boys who were not promoted to second grade could have been included in the second grade testing. These findings indicate that total developmental age is the most important factor when considering admission for school. A closer look should be taken at the requirements for school entrance. The factors that must be considered are chronological age, mental age, physical maturity, emotional and social maturity, behavior age, and sex.

In developing training for new technologies, designers encounter many options in an effort to increase system knowledge and produce effective system usage. Technological advancements do, however, provide the opportunity for more dynamic and interactive training methods. Moreover, technology may require the acquisition of time-sensitive skills. Many technologies have automatic shut-off or low-power functions, like the shutting off the backlight of a cell phone after 30 seconds. These system functions may lead to errors for novice users or for infrequent tasks. To develop effective training for time-sensitive tasks, the learner needs instruction on how to accurately perform the task at a particular pace. One potentially fruitful avenue of exploration is to provide the learning goal during training through the pace of the training materials. This presentation pace is the rate at which training tasks are presented to the learner during training; this pace may be fixed or self-regulated. The goal of the current study was to examine the role of presentation in learning a complex technology using four types of pacing for younger adults (Experiment 1) and older adults (Experiment 2). The results of this study show there seems to be a benefit of self-paced training for younger adults and older adults. These findings provide insight into future studies investigating the underlying mechanisms related to the benefits of self-paced training. Additionally, the findings have implications for the development of training paradigms for time-sensitive technologies.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Arizona State University, 1998. / Adviser: Howard Sullivan. Includes bibliographical references.

Past studies showed that older workers maintained a high level of job performance despite declines in physical and cognitive abilities. The present research project aimed at examining the impacts of emotion regulatory and SOC (selection, optimization, and compensation) strategies in explaining how older workers manage to maintain a high level of job performance. Two studies were conducted to assess Chinese insurance sales workers' global and momentary employment of emotion regulatory and SOC strategies at work, and to compare the effectiveness of emotion regulatory and SOC strategies in predicting job performance for younger and older workers. Study 1 was a cross-sectional survey study and consisted of 355 insurance sales workers. Results showed that older adults reported higher employment of elective selection and optimization than did younger workers. Older workers' employment of elective selection and compensation, as well as suppression, was associated with higher job performance, however such association was not found among younger workers. Study 2 was a five-day experience sampling study. It consisted of 87 participants who carried a handheld computer that recorded their momentary employment of emotion regulatory and SOC strategies during their work. Results of the multilevel analyses revealed that older and younger workers varied in their use of cognitive reappraisal, elective selection, and loss-based selection across work-related situations with different levels of task difficulty. Older workers' greater use of the four SOC strategies and suppression in the sampling period was predictive of the post-sampling increase in sales commission. Among these strategies, elective selection contributed the most to the increase in insurance sales among older workers even after accounting for the impact of other strategies. Findings from this research project contribute to the understanding of Chinese workers' psychological adaptation in the face of age-related declines in cognitive abilities. They also revealed cultural differences in the effectiveness of emotion regulatory strategies in predicting job performance of older and younger workers. Moreover, these findings shed light on the types of recommendations that should be given to employers for modifying organizational policies and implementing appropriate training and development programs, to meet with the needs of the aging workforce. / Yeung, Yuen Lan Dannii. / Adviser: Helene H. Fung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: B, page: 3821. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-86). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest dissertations and theses, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Studies of life span development in everyday problem solving suggest two trajectories of change in adulthood: individuals become less effective at solving well-defined instrumental problems but more effective at managing ill-defined interpersonal problems. Two experiments were conducted to examine the ability of young and older adults to effectively manage an interpersonal problem that has a well-defined measure of instrumental success. Participants played an iterated Prisoner s Dilemma game with same-age, computer-simulated strangers (Experiment 1) and friends (Experiment 2). Success was dependent upon one s ability to put aside self-interest and cooperate with a partner. Computer-simulated partners reciprocated the participants decisions 100% of the time or behaved in a more self-interested manner. Young and older adults tendencies to create conflict with the reciprocating partner and their defensive reactions to the selfish partner were examined. Although young adults outperformed older adults when playing the game on their own, they did not carry this performance advantage into the interactive rounds. In fact, despite their success when playing alone, young adults were no more successful than older adults when interacting with others. Young and older adults both cooperated more with friends than with strangers and more with the reciprocating partner than the selfish partner. However, when the participants first interaction was with a selfish stranger, older adults were more cooperative than young adults and consequently accrued more reward. This is consistent with previous research demonstrating that older adults use more passive interpersonal problem solving strategies than young adults, and it also partially supports the prediction that advancing age leads to more effective strategy implementation when solving interpersonal problems.

Self-paced study involves choosing items for (re)study and determining how much time will be allocated to those items so as to maximize later recall, making it a viable venue for examining whether there are age-related differences in metacognitive control. Two prominent models have been proposed to account for item selection and study time allocation behaviors during self-paced study. The Discrepancy Reduction Model (DRM; Dunlosky & Hertzog, 1998; Nelson & Leonesio, 1988) suggests individuals will always select and allocate the most time to items that have not yet been learned, whereas the Region of Proximal Learning model (RPL; Metcalfe, 2002) predicts individuals will select the easiest unknown items and will only later select and allocate time to the more difficult items if time constraints permit, thus making distinctions among unlearned items graded by difficulty. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether younger and older adults item selection and study time allocation behaviors would be more consistent with DRM or RPL model predictions. Across both experiments younger and older adults initially selected easier items for study, providing the first evidence to date that the RPL model would extend to older adults self-paced study of heterogeneously difficult Spanish-English vocabulary pairs. However, both younger and older adults allocated more time to difficult than easier items. The assignment of point values to items in Experiment 2 affected how likely participants were to pursue each of four experimenter-determined task goals that either stressed the number of words recalled, points earned, or both. Whether point values initially favored recall of easy or difficult items interacted with time constraints to influence the basis (objective versus subjective difficulty) and order of participants item selections (Experiment 2). However, younger adults were better able to effectively allocate their study time to achieve self-determined (Experiment 1) and experimenter-determined goals (Experiment 2), indicating age-related differences in metacognitive control despite younger and older adults having similar memory self-efficacy ratings and encoding strategy use behaviors.

Technological advances will allow virtual agents to increasingly help individuals with daily activities. As such, virtual agents will interact with users of various ages and experience levels. Facial expressions are often used to facilitate social interaction between agents and humans. However, older and younger adults do not label human or virtual agent facial expressions in the same way, with older adults commonly mislabeling certain expressions. The dynamic formation of facial expression, or motion, may provide additional facial information potentially making emotions less ambiguous. This study examined how motion affects younger and older adults in recognizing various intensities of emotion displayed by a virtual agent. Contrary to the dynamic advantage found in emotion recognition for human faces, older adults had higher emotion recognition for static virtual agent faces than dynamic ones. Motion condition did not influence younger adults' emotion recognition. Younger adults had higher emotion recognition than older adults for the emotions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness. Low intensities of expression had lower emotion recognition than medium to high expression intensities.