Age differences and the identity negative priming effect: An updated meta-analysis.

A recent meta-analysis (P. Verbaeghen & L. De Meersman, 1998a) revealed that older adults show a reliable but significantly reduced negative priming effect compared with young adults. The present study provides an updated quantitative review on the effect of aging on the magnitude of the negative priming effect in identity tasks. This analysis demonstrated that the negative priming effect was not significantly different between young and old adults. This result differs from P. Verhaeghen and L. De Meersman's study. The implications of this finding for inhibitory-based theories of cognitive aging are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Target selection difficulty, negative priming, and aging.

It has been recently suggested that the presence of identity negative priming effects in old adults could occur when there is substantial processing of the distracting information in a selective attention task (J. M. Kieley & A. A. Hartley, 1997). In three experiments, using a letter identification task, it was found that making target selection more difficult increased the magnitude of the negative priming effect to a similar extent in both young and old adults. Moreover, the size of the negative priming effect did not differ between young and elderly participants. These results are discussed with respect to the issue of age-related deficits in the mechanisms underlying negative priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Normal aging affects decisions under ambiguity, but not decisions under risk.

Old adults have to face many situations that require important decisions. In the present investigation, the authors examined the effects of aging on both decisions under ambiguity and decisions under risk. To this purpose, healthy young and old adults completed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Probability-Associated Gambling task (PAG task). Old adults performed the PAG task as well as young adults, demonstrating ability to make decisions when full information about the problem situation, the options' probabilities and the associated gains and losses was given. Differently, old adults showed poor performance on the IGT relative to young adults, indicating difficulty in making advantageous decisions under ambiguous conditions. Indeed, in the IGT, participants are not aware of the rules for gains and losses and have to learn about the utility of their selections through experience. Results of our analyses point to the contribution of executive functions to all types of decisions. Our findings have also practical implications, suggesting that old people can make advantageous decisions when complete information about the decision situation is available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)