The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition

“Salthouse (1996) described the role of processing speed in retrieval mechanisms, such that the products of retrieved attributes may be lost by the time other relevant information is located.”

“Today it is well documented that important declines on a number of main cognitive functions take place during the ageing process (Baltes & Lindenberger, 1997; Nilsson, 2003; Park et al., 2002; Salthouse, 1996; see also Craik & Salthouse, 2000, 2008; Nilsson, 2003; Park & Schwarz, 2000; Park, Polk, Mikels, Taylor, & Ma…”

“Another aim of the current study is to establish whether SME change temporally across the three age groups, since there is broad evidence suggesting a generalized slowing of cognitive processing with advancing age (Salthouse, 1996).”

“A dominant view in cognitive aging research is that changes in memory reflect changes in the informationprocessing system, for example cognitive slowing (Salthouse, 1996) or problems in inhibitory functions (Craik & Bialystok, 2006; Van Hooren et al., 2007b).”

“However, these results contrast with theories of generalised slowing according to which aging slows all processing stages [19].”

“…aging emphasize three aspects of information processing that negatively affect cognitive abilities: declining speed of information processing (Salthouse, 1996); lack of resources and the reduced capacity of working memory (Craik & Byrd, 1982); and poor capacity for inhibiting irrelevant…”

“31,32 Among persons who are cognitively intact, the domain of processing speed may be one that is most malleable on account of the normative declines that appear.”

“Furthermore, one model proposes that processing efficiency declines are due to cascading failures, originating in lower-order processes, leading to failures in higherorder processes (Salthouse, 1996).”

“There we ssociated differences in P3 latency.”

“As described above, cognitive speed is sometimes characterised as a fundamental part of the architecture of cognitive functions (Kail and Salthouse, 1994), or a resource for cognitive functioning (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Cognitive aging is typically described in terms of a general decline of cognitive performance, in particular a general slowing of processing speed based on the mean performance of individuals [1].”

“…aging theories, such as the sensory deficit theory (Baltes and Lindenberger, 1997), resources deficit theory (Craik, 1986), speed deficit theory (Salthouse, 1996), and inhibition deficit theory (Hasher and Zacks, 1988) were developed to explain age-related differences in behavioral performance,…”

“as the one from Salthouse’s guiding to a decrease in the speed of information processing (Clay et al., 2009; Rajah & McIntosh, 2008; Salthouse, 1996).”

“…Drachman, 2006; Jernigan et al., 1991; Langford, Everall, & Masliah, 2005), neurocognitive impairment (e.g., Reger, Welsh, Razani, Martin, & Boone, 2002; Salthouse, 1996), and corresponding functional declines (CahnWeiner, Mallow, Boyle, Marran, & Salloway, 2000; Heaton, Marcotte, et al., 2004).”

“One candidate is processing speed (Birren, 1964; Salthouse, 1996), and it has gained considerable empirical support.”

“En effet, de nombreuses études ont montré qu’elle possède une valeur heuristique exceptionnelle dans l’explication de difficultés cognitives liées au vieillissement normal (voir par exemple Salthouse (1996)).”

“Older readers have difficultly detecting differences in low contrast colors (Schieber, 2006) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2009) Doak et al.”

“Specifically, processing speed has been shown to exert a strong influence on older adults’ working memory performance (e.g. Salthouse, 1992, 1994, 1996) and could therefore differentially impact older adults’ encoding success and subsequent binding memory performance.”

“One major limitation of the Traxler et al. (2005) study, however, is that they included only one individualdifference variable, working-memory capacity, in their analyses.”

“In line with the age differences observed in the RT effects on our blocked design experiments, these results are at least somewhat consistent with the research that reports an age-related slowing on speeded RT tasks (Salthouse, 1996), and are consistent with the suggestion that older adults tend to be more cautious (L…”

“…have been shown to decline nearly linearly with age starting from early adulthood, including processing speed and efficiency (S.-C. Li et al., 2004; Salthouse, 1994, 1996), working memory (McArdle, Ferrer-Caja, Hamagami, & Woodcock, 2002; Salthouse, 1992), attention, and problem solving (Craik &…”

“B), which is consistent with studies showing declines in processing speed during aging (Salthouse, 1996).”

“…in adult aging, where age-related hearing impairment is often accompanied by reduced working memory capacity and executive function (McCabe, Roediger, Mcdaniel, Balota, & Hambrick, 2010; Salthouse, 1994), and a general slowing in a number of perceptual and cognitive tasks (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Older age groups score lower on this factor, predicting lower performance across all tasks, consistent with cognitive slowing theories of aging that affect a broad range of tasks 30 .”

“During the aging process in rodents and humans, and/or lower accuracy is observed (Salthouse, 1996; Ratcliff et al., 2007a; McGovern et al., 2018; Gur et al., 2020; Theisen et al., 2020).”

“Rather than a general speed deficit (Salthouse, 1996), the results can be interpreted as showing that speed deficits in aging adults result from other deficits (in this case, engaging in slower counting processes for some lists that are more quickly subitized by younger adults).”

“1985; Cerella & Hale, 1994; Myerson, Hale, Wagstaff, Poon, & Smith, 1990; Salthouse, 1996 ).”

“In some studies, researchers have found that age-related decreases in inhibitory function are largely due to the generalized slowing that occurs with increasing age ( Rossit & Harvey, 2008 ; Salthouse, 1996, 2000 ).”

“There is extensive evidence that information processing not only slows with increasing age (see Salthouse, 1996a, b) but that older adults do not improve as much as younger adults with extended practice on performance tasks (Czaja & Sharit, 1993; Fisk, Cooper, Hertzog, & Anderson-Garlach, 1995;…”

“Moreover, as older subjects are slower than young adults (Salthouse, 1996), it is possible that the older adults did not have enough time to encode the visual pattern because the matrix was presented for only two seconds, however many black squares had to be memorized.”

“…on general mechanisms such as inhibition (Lustig, Hasher, & Zacks, 2007; Hasher, Stoltzfus, Zacks, & Rypma, 1991; Hasher & Zacks, 1988) or speed (Salthouse, 1996; Lima, Hale, & Myerson, 1991; Cerella, 1985), which do not readily explain the asymmetry of age-related effects in phonological and…”

“... together, the results suggest that the older adults in our study were sensitive to the difficulty of encoding a new character in a narrative inhabited by other characters (i.e., they increased their reading time allocation as did the younger participants), but they did not allocate sufficient effort to instantiate…”

“A considerable amount of evidence indicates that processing speed accounts for a substantial part of the age variance in performance across a wide range of cognitive measures (e.g., for a comprehensive review, see Salthouse, 1996).”

“The slowing of cognitive processes would have global and uniform effects on cognitive functioning as it limits its general efficacy [41 – 43].”

“E-mail: hartman@email.unc.edu Accepted for publication: August 29, 2000. performance on simple, speeded perceptual tasks (Salthouse, 1996).”

“These findings are consistent with prior studies showing generally more pronounced age-related decline in memory and processing speed (e.g., Finkel, Reynolds, McArdle, & Pedersen, 2007; Park et al., 2002; Salthouse, 1996; Schaie, 1989).”

“Increasing age 34,35 and chronic smoking 29,36 are independently associated with poorer performance on measures of processing speed and global cognitive function in middle-aged and elder adults.”

“Age × Change Detection interactions showed that List 1 responses came to mind first at test more often for young adults in both of the above cases, smallest F(1, 37) = 6.”

“This finding precludes any explanation of any possible difference between passive and active participants in executive functions in terms of a general change in speed of processing, because if it were the case, it would be reflected both in go RTs and SSRT in both conditions (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Taken together, the present findings suggest that reduced WM efficiency with increasing WM load is attributable to an inability to strategically manipulate information for later retrieval, which results in information degradation or loss (cf. Rypma & D’Esposito, 1999; Salthouse, 1996).”

“Briefly, OAs showed less accurate face perception, slower processing speed, poorer associative memory, a lower level of depression, and higher general trust than did YAs, which is consistent with the reported effects of aging on these variables (Benton & Van Allen, 1968; Blazer, 2003; Castle et al., 2012; Naveh-Benjam…”

“Disproportionate slowing of the information processing speed is presumably related to cognitive limitations.(53) Difficulties in spatial recognition memory as well as short-term or working memory are correlated with the duration of delirium.”

“Adoption of this strategy is thought to compensate for a reduction in information processing efficiency in old age linked to a reduction in hippocampal and frontal lobe volume (Diamond et al., 2000; Salthouse, 1996).”

“sample included university-aged women who, on the basis of their age, can be presumed to be at their life-span minimum for RTs (27, 28).”

“…deficits instead may relate to general decreased processing efficiency arising from an overall slowing across multiple processing operations critical for cognitive function (Eckert, Keren, Roberts, Calhoun, & Harris, 2010; Finkel, Reynolds, McArdle, & Pedersen, 2007; Salthouse, 1996, 2000).”

“These age related declines in cognitive function are normal [2], even in the absence of underlying pathology [3] and they are most pronounced for tasks relying on information processing speed and executive functions [3,4].”

“Consistent with the literature (e.g., Myerson, Ferraro, Hale, & Lima, 1992; Myerson & Hale, 1993; Salthouse, 1996), the older participants were slower overall than the younger.”

“In line with results of other investigators (Salthouse, 1996; Isingrini and Vazou, 1997), cognitive test scores showed declined performance with aging.”

“From these and other studies we know that processing speed becomes slower with increasing age (Jacobson, Nielsen, Minthon, Warkentin, & Wiig, 2004; Perry & Hodges, 1999; Salthouse, 1996).”

“Bislang konzentrierte sich das theoretische und empirische Interesse vorwiegend auf drei Konstrukte: (a) Die Verarbeitungsgeschwindigkeit(Salthouse, 1996) oder die Geschwindigkeit, mit der elementare kognitive Operationen ausgeführt werden können; (b) das Arbeitsgedächtnis (Baddeley, 1996;Just,…”

“This is in line with numerous studies (e.g., Borella, Ghisletta, & de Ribaupierre, 2011; Fry & Hale, 1996; Salthouse, 1996) indicating that speed plays a major role in explaining individual differences in WM performance.”

“The older principals plainly react to common public constructions of old age in modern societies in terms of stagnation, doubt, conservativeness, physical and mental decline, and the like (Greller & Stroh, 2004), as well as to images of the older worker as slow, unhealthy, worn out, and closed-minded (Hoyer & Rooding,…”

“According to Processing Speed Theory, processing speed is a fundamental mechanism for higher-level cognition because it greatly influences the availability of information for advanced cognitive processing (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Processing speed is a core feature of cognitive functioning, and reduced processing speed may contribute to cognitive impairment in aging (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Processing speed is a measure of time required to respond to information in one’s environment (15).”

“Slowing information processing is one of the best documented, most pervasive and reliable markers of brain aging in non-demented adults (Salthouse, 1996, 2000).”

“For instance, older people might experience a decline in several cognitive functions such as memory [1], attention [2], executive functions [3,4], and processing speed [5].”

“The PCT requires participants to quickly process and differentiate between different visual patterns, thus serving as a measure of processing speed (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Cognitive processing speed (CPS) reaches its zenith during early adulthood (Salthouse, 1996) and declines from midlife onward (Salthouse, 2009), with age-related cognitive slowing widely reported (Cerella and Hale, 1994; Jenkins et al., 2000).”

“Second, although processing speed is considered to be a foundational competence for other cognitive abilities in adulthood this relation may not hold true in infancy (Salthouse 1996; Ritchie et al. 2015b).”