The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition

“It has already shed light on the neurocognitive processes underlying the well-established association between speed and age-related cognitive decline (Salthouse, 1996; Schubert, Hagemann, Löffler, & Frischkorn, 2020).”

“processing-speed, could account for the loss of performance [50].”

“To ensure that the response time differences between conditions were not the result of general slowing phenomena in the older group (Salthouse, 1996), we repeated the analysis in which the difference scores RTT–NT and RTIT–NT were divided by the average response time in the NT trials.”

“Salthouse’s simultaneity theory (Salthouse, 1996) was proposed as one mechanism that may underlie the age-related deficits in implicit sequence learning of higher order structure.”

“Aging has long been shown to have a negative impact on the speed of information processing (e.g., Salthouse, 1996), regardless of modality, and such a cognitive decline could underlie the associations observed in this study between the measures of auditory processing, IQ, and age.”

“Aging and the corresponding health related declines in physical and cognitive function play an obvious role in reducing spare cognitive capacity [14].”

“They argued that age-related changes in information-processing speed contribute importantly to the decline of all cognitive functions, speeded and unspeeded alike (see also Salthouse, 1991, 1996).”

“One conceptualization that helps relate WM integrity to higher processing efficiency may be the role of WM in processing speed (Salthouse, 1996; Deary, 2000; Jensen, 2006).”

“Semantic knowledge is acquired throughout life, and the storage and use of this type of information appears to be relatively unimpaired by aging (Salthouse 1982, 1996; Nyberg and others 1996; Burke and Mackay 1997).”

“One probable neurophysiological mechanism is the loss of neural connectivity or decreased levels of neurotransmitters in the aging brain.(13,14) The difference in poststandardization procedural times, however, supports an age-related decline in psychomotor skills required for this procedure.”

“Keywords: speech recognition, working memory, inhibition, sentence comprehension, ELU model Introduction Raymond Carhart has been credited with coining the term “audiology” (an interesting mix of Latin and Greek roots), and offering the first formal course with that name at Northwestern University in 1946.”

“Analyses of response times, which showed longer response times in the older age group (Salthouse, 1996), suggest that the age-related decline in route-learning abilities cannot be explained by a speed – accuracy trade-off.”

“Our results argue against a general slowing account (Salthouse, 1996) and rather lend support to the Inhibitory Deficit Theory (Hasher & Zacks, 1988), given that inhibition deficits are present in aMCI after accounting for processing speed.”

“Processing speed , i.e. the ability to carry out mental operations quickly and efficiently, has been proposed as the prime indicator of cognitive ageing and the driving cause of other impairment (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Salthouse (1985, 1996) argued that age-related dual-task costs reflect a general reduction in speed of cognitive processing associated with age.”

“Based on the findings investigating the role of processing speed in prospective memory and in general cognitive aging (e.g., Salthouse, 1996), it may be expected that processing speed might be a factor contributing to (age-related) delayed-execute prospective memory performance.”

“Yet, our brain, albeit malleable, inevitably undergoes certain degrees of age-associated cortical degeneration at the molecular level as age advances.”

“Furthermore, there is a general decrease of processing speed (e.g. Salthouse, 1996) and a reduced ability to inhibit irrelevant information (e.g. Hasher & Zacks, 1988).”

“Processing speed is an individual cognitive ability measured by how fast an individual executes cognitive tasks, particularly elementary cognitive tasks [1], [2].”

“Balance and Cognitive Function In Normal and Pathological Aging Somberg and Salthouse (1982) advocated that more experimental paradigms are needed to fully understand the potentials and limits of an aging system in the situations of divided attention.”

“…performance on cognitive tasks, statistical control of the effect of processing speed on working-memory tasks greatly reduces or eliminates the effect of working-memory on many cognitive functions (Kliegl & Mayr, 1992; Salthouse, 1991; Verhaeghen & Salthouse, 1997; see Salthouse, 1996, for review).”

“One hypothesis that has been proposed is that all components of information processing decline at approximately the same rate, independently of task complexity and task types [12] leading to the conceptualization of a model that held that age differences in the performance of cognitive tasks can be explained by age di…”

“general, for instance pre-existing associations between items (Naveh-Benjamin, Brav, & Levy, 2007), item presentation time (Salthouse, 1996), or list length (Kahana, Dolan, Sauder, & Wingfield, 2005; Smith, 1979).”

“with age (Fjell et al., 2013; Salthouse, 1996).”

“4 Discussion The results of experiment 1 indicate that human observers (both younger and older) can perceive natural object shape through their sense of active touch about as accurately as when using vision (see figure 2). This result is consistent with the findings of Klatzky et al (1985); they showed that younger ob…”

“Resources such as these appear to play a crucial role in processing sentence material such as grammatical structure, although it is unclear whether these resources are material-neutral or dedicated to sentence processing (Caplan and Waters, 1999; Just and Carpenter, 1992; Salthouse, 1996).”

“This delay is in line with the reduction of processing speed during aging (Salthouse, 1996).”

“…were found for semantic memory and the negative and disorganization dimensions respectively (r = .262, p = .005; r = .228, p = .014) In order to examine whether speed explains the difference in memory measures between patients and controls, we used the method suggested by Salthouse (1996).”

“…in cognitive effi ciency have often been attributed to declines in basic resources or processes thought to underlie cognition, such as speed of processing, working memory, and executive functions (e.g., McCabe, Roediger, McDaniel, Balota, & Hambrick, 2010 ; Park & Payer, 2006 ; Salthouse, 1996 ).”

“In the same way, our results also go further than the simultaneity mechanism postulated by Salthouse (1996), according to which the products of early processing may be lost by the time later processing is completed because the availability of information decreases over time as a function of either…”

“Comments The behavioral data were consistent with the well-known agerelated response slowing [42], which was not associated with a decrement in accuracy, and consistent with the notion of a speedaccuracy trade-off in the elderly [43], [44], [45], [46].”

“Given the well-documented age effects on processing speed and working memory (Salthouse, 1996), this result was predictable.”

“…pure, research to date strongly suggests that cognitive speed is the prime determinant of the coding task performance, with other elementary mental processes such as working memory and selective attention playing a subsidiary role (Joy, Kaplan, & Fein, 2004; Lezak et al., 2004; Salthouse, 1996).”

“The cognitive decline that accompanies normal aging is characterized by selectivity as well as generality in the pattern of changes (Light 1991; Salthouse 1996 ).”

“Several factors have been proposed to drive age-related cognitive decline and WM performance, such as slowing speed of processing (Salthouse, 1996), worsening suppression of irrelevant information (i.e., interference control; Hasher & Zacks, 1988) degrading sensory functioning (Baltes &…”

“As noted above, RT was slower in the older group even when accuracy was matched, and the later onset of the study material effect in these subjects might therefore be a reflection of age-related cognitive slowing (Salthouse, 1996), rather than of a specific impairment of retrieval cue processing (see Mark & Rugg, 1998…”

“Previous research has shown that aspects of motor skill ability decline with age.(25,26) The current study found that elderly participants performed a procedural motor sequence task much more slowly than healthy college participants.”

“Some authors highlight the role of cognitive slowing (Salthouse, 1996), but others point to impairment in visual processing (Baltes & Lindenberger, 1997), or executive/prefrontal functioning (Tisserand & Jolles, 2003; West, 1996).”

“Chronological age was included in the analyses as a covariate given the nature of the sample (adults between the ages of 56 and 93 years) and based on the findings of age-related reductions in processing speed (Salthouse, 1996), attention (Plude, Schwartz, & Murphy, 1996), working memory (Babcock & Salthouse, 1990), c…”

“Because of the welldocumented age differences in many cognitive measures (e.g., Salthouse, 1996 ), there could be age differences in memory failures.”

“According to Salthouse (1996), persons with reduced processing speed have difficulty processing incoming information and using previously learned information efficiently.”

“This procedure ensured sufficient processing time for older participants, who commonly have prolonged RTs (Cabeza, 2001;Madden et al., 1996;Salthouse, 1996) as they did herein, but may also have afforded time to process beyond the global level.”

“In closing, the results of the current study are consistent with the view that the speed of information processing slows with adult aging in some fundamental cognitive systems (Salthouse, 1996), but they are inconsistent with the view that younger adults always process information more quickly than older adults (Cerel…”

“Slower processing seems to contribute to many of the age-related declines seen in cognition (Finkel, Reynolds, McArdle, & Pedersen, 2005; Salthouse, 1996) and so may be one common cause factor of age-related changes in functioning.”

“Numerous studies have shown that on a wide range of psychophysical tasks, older listeners are not as able as younger listeners to process information accurately when it is presented at a rapid rate (Salthouse, 1996; Wingfield et al., 1985).”

“Insofar as cognitive slowing is a consequence of aging (e.g., Salthouse, 1996 ), it has been of interest to examine whether P300 latency changes with age.”

“Processing speed influences nearly all cognitive tasks due to the limited time available to perform a given task and because degradation of information over time may cause the products of early processing to be lost by the time later processing is completed (98).”

“The negative mediation of processing speed as well as executive functions on the ageclustering relationship indicated that the age-related decline in letter fluency was linked to the role of speed processing and executive function (Barringer et al. 1996; Baudouin et al. 2006; Bryan and Luszcz 2000; Crawford et al. 200…”

“These resources have also been conceptualized in terms of reduced working memory capacity (Salthouse, 1996) needed to hold and manipulate information or make computations (Craik & Jennings, 1992).”

“To compare the effect of the different cueing conditions across groups, the age-related decline in processing speed (Salthouse, 1996) was first taken into account by dividing the mean RT in each condition for each individual by his overall RT across all ANT trials (proportion RT: pRT)…”

“The reduced stimulus contrast caused by cataracts can slow or impair the recognition and processing of visual environmental cues (Harley, Dillon, & Loftus, 2004; Pashler, 1984), resulting in a strategic slowing of driving speed, potentially exacerbating the effects of age-related cognitive slowing (Salthouse, 1996).”

“These advantages are particularly useful for cognitive neuroscience investigations of ageing, as differences in response time (Salthouse, 1996) and hemodynamic responsivity (Huettel, Singerman, & McCarthy, 2001; Velanova et al. 2003) may complicate and confound the interpretation of significant…”

“According to this view, aging is associated with slower (cf. Salthouse, 1996) but otherwise unaffected cognitive processing and therefore predicts no age differences in the use of memory retrieval cues.”

“How much of the age effect reflects slowing from cognitive aging (e.g., Park & Reuter-Lorenz, 2009; Park & Schwarz, 2000; Park et al., 1996; Salthouse, 1991, 1996) versus greater conscientiousness among older respondents is hard to disentangle in the current data.”

“…aging (Salthouse, 1996; Fujiyama et al., 2012), and there is debate whether these agerelated declines arise from an increase in neural noise (Salthouse, 1996), changes in neural structures and functions (Coxon et al., 2014), and/or a shift in cognitive strategies that prioritize accuracy…”

“First, measures of speed of processing were collected ( Salthouse, 1996 ).”

“Assigning a mediating role to processing speed has become almost standard as far as cognitive ageing is concerned (e.g., Salthouse, 1996; Salthouse & Meinz, 1995).”

“…showed similar go RTs within each version of the SST (strategic and standard), it is important to note that both groups did not differ in terms of general speed of processing (Salthouse, 1996), which means that the benefit induced by chronic exercise is specific to the inhibition process.”

“This might be explained by the fact that, compared with their younger counterparts, older people process information more slowly than younger ones [4], they perceive more difficulties in organizing and storing information [5] and experience a reduced capacity to ignore irrelevant information [6].”

“The fact that the upper asymptote of performance was lower in older subjects implies that the observed age differences in performance are not due entirely to slower processing by the senescent visual system (Salthouse, 1996).”

“First introduced in the context of cognition and aging, Brinley plots (Brinley, 1965; Salthouse, 1996) are now also used in the area of intelligence (e.”