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Abstract:
Recent focus in cognitive aging research has been on
executive processing. The current series of experiments focused on
one aspect of executive functioning, that is task combination,
otherwise known as dual task performance. Although it is
consistently found that older adults are poor at dual-tasking,
there is less agreement on whether their decrement is worse than
predicted from single task performance. Using the n - back
procedure (Riby, Perfect and Stollery, submitted) we investigated
whether task domain moderates dual-task costs in old age. In
experiment one we used a dual task in which younger and older
adults were required to generate category members or paired
associate responses to cues that had just been presented (no load)
or to cues that had been presented on previous trials (load). The
proportional costs of dual-tasking were age-invariant for semantic
retrieval but were particularly marked for episodic retrieval. The
data did not support an account based on task difficulty but
provided evidence that the age effect in dual tasking studies may
be domain specific. To investigate this further, currently underway
are a sentence verification, mental arithmetic and visual spatial
version of the n - back task.
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