The extent to which cortical plasticity is retained in old age remains an understudied question, despite large social and scientific implications of such a result. Neuroimaging research reports individual differences in age-related activation, thereby educing speculation that some degree of plasticity may remain throughout life. We conducted a randomized longitudinal dual-task training study to...

3 experiments examined serial pattern learning in younger and older adults. Unlike the usual repeating pattern, the sequences alternated between events from a repeating pattern and those determined randomly. The results indicated that no one was able to describe the regularity, but with practice every individual in all 3 age groups (including old old) became faster, more accurate, or both, on p...

A theory is proposed to account for some of the age-related differences reported in measures of Type A or fluid cognition. The central hypothesis in the theory is that increased age in adulthood is associated with a decrease in the speed with which many processing operations can be executed and that this reduction in speed leads to impairments in cognitive functioning because of what are termed...

Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data from a national sample spanning the adult life span, age differences in anger and sadness were explored. The cross-sectional and longitudinal findings consistently suggest that the frequency of anger increases during young adulthood, but then shows a steady decrease until old age. By contrast, the frequency of sadness remains stable over most of adult...

Young and older adults were contrasted in three experiments that involved manipulation of the number of required spatial integration operations (Experiments 1 and 2) and manipulation of the amount of information per operation (Experiment 3). Older adults performed at lower levels of accuracy than did young adults in each experiment. However, the magnitude of the age differences tended to increa...

The aim of this study was to analyze gender and age differences in physical inactivity in Croatia and physical inactivity pattern changes during the five-year period. The study is based on the data obtained from the Croatian Adult Health Cohort Study which was carried out in 2003 and 2008. The prevalence of physical inactivity in 2008 was 37.7%, 36.8% in men and 38.1% in women. In both study wa...

This study investigated the development of false memories for basic and superordinate names using the DRM procedure. Two experiments were conducted with younger (3-5 years old) and older (10-12 years old) children. In the first experiment the DRM procedure was used with categorised lists and in the second experiment both types of lists--categorised and associative--were applied. False recogniti...

The present study examined age differences in performance on the Tower of London, a measure of strategic planning, in a diverse sample of 890 individuals between the ages of 10 and 30. Although mature performance was attained by age 17 on relatively easy problems, performance on the hardest problems showed improvements into the early 20s. Furthermore, whereas age-related performance gains by ch...

The purpose of the present research was to explore the role of stereotype threat as a mediator of older people's memory performance under different instructional sets. In three studies, younger and older participants completed a memory test that was either framed as a memorization or as an impression formation task. Across these studies, memory performance was greater for younger than for older...

It has been hypothesized that reward-seeking and impulsivity develop along different timetables and have different neural underpinnings, and that the difference in their timetables helps account for heightened risk-taking during adolescence. In order to test these propositions, age differences in reward-seeking and impulsivity were examined in a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse sample o...