The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition

“…processing speed with aging (Rey-Robert et al., 2012; Sleimen-Malkoun et al., 2013; Temprado et al., 2013),which is also oneof the hallmarks of age effects on the cognitive system (e.g., Bashore, Ridderinkhof, & van der Molen, 1997; Birren, Woods, & Williams, 1980; Cerella, 1985; Salthouse, 1996).”

“…Stine, Lahar, & Aberdeen, 1988) and overall decreases in processing speed (Cerella, 1990; Chaytor & Schmitter-Edgecombe, 2004; Fisk & Warr, 1996; Salthouse, 1993, 1996), thereby limiting the amount and potentially the type of information that older persons can encode into constructs and store.”

“Cognitive functions decline with increasing age (Salthouse, 1996).”

“For example, since WM integrity should be positively related to neural complexity, then as WM integrity declines with old age, brain function also would be less efficient, and ultimately lead to slower processing speeds—a general characteristic of aging [24,25].”

“The latter is especially important as speeded measures usually penalize increasing age (cf. Salthouse, 1996; StineMorrow et al., 2008).”

“Aligned with previous psychology research, task time (i.e., processing speed) increases as age increases (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Hence, multivariate relationships between resting-state BOLD variability and performance costs on the attentional control tasks may be sensitive in part to individual differences in processing speed (see Faust et al., 1999; Salthouse, 1996; Myerson, Hale, Wagstaff, Poon, & Smith, 1990).”

“Processing speed refers to how fast neurocognitive operations are executed and represents a wide-reaching neurocognitive domain that may underlie functioning in many other domains (Dickinson & Gold, 2008b; Salthouse, 1996).”

“PS is defined as the ability to identify, discriminate, integrate and respond to simple and complex information, and is considered to play a key role as a primary function subserving higherorder cognitive abilities (Frantom et al., 2008; Kieseppä et al., 2005; Salthouse, 1996; Weiss et al., 2016).”

“173 Alternatively, the bilateral PFC activity might reflect a form of functional non-selectivity among the elderly.”

“A common explanation for many of the cognitive changes manifested with age is a general slowing of older observers’ perceptual and information processing speed (Salthouse, 1996), and it is possible that such slowing might account for the age-related Fig.”

“( 1990 ) and Salthouse ( 1996 ), which predict a disproportionate increase of RT in older adults as a function of the number of processing steps, do not apply to middle age.”

“However, this impairment cannot be linked with impairments in speed of processing, as it has been previously stated [41], because of the significant higher level of perseverative errors made by the AD patients.”

“It is evident that various cognitive performances declined in aging that include processing speed [7] and episodic memory [8, 9].”

“The consequences of hearing loss for speech perception, moreover, are not strictly sensory but may extend to other aspects of cognitive function (Gordon-Salant & Fitzgibbons, 1997; Lindenberger & Baltes, 1994; Salthouse, 1996; Scialfa, 2002), including working memory performance.”

“, [28-31]).”

“Older adults are known to be slower than young adults in processing sensory stimuli (e.g., Salthouse, 1996).”

“In the context of the processing speed theory of cognitive aging (Finkel et al., 2007; Salthouse, 1996), these results suggest that somatic anxiety may have a greater capacity for interference with processing speed compared to cognitive anxiety, particularly among older adults with milder,…”

“…1983; Stine-Morrow et al., 2006), deficits in abilities to bind one piece of information to another (NavehBenjamin, Guez, Kilb, & Reedy, 2004), decreases in processing speed (e.g., Salthouse, 1996), and deficits in abilities to discard irrelevant information as they read (Hamm & Hasher, 1992).”

“Consequently, in recent years there has been a shift toward more “global” explanations, in which the effects of aging are attributed to a single factor such as reduced processing speed (see Salthouse, 1996).”

“Particularly encouraging is the finding that executive function and working memory, two cognitive domains that seem to invariably decline with age and have been implicated in cognitive decline [41] and AD [42], appear most responsive to cardiovascular fitness [28,37,43].”

“For example, consider the broad causal role that Salthouse (1996) has assigned to changes in processing speed, affecting both working memory and higher cognitive abilities.”

“Although no causal learning studies have directly addressed this issue, there is evidence that an age-related decline in processing speed (e.g., Salthouse, 1996 ) may lead to greater impairments in older adults ' contingency learning for briefl y presented stimuli ( Parr & Mercier, Table 1.”

“According to the limited time and simultaneity mechanisms proposed by Salthouse (1996), high processing speed may facilitate the encoding of the to-be learned material and the retrieval.”

“…stimulus onset in the test phase and longer to respond than our younger participants, which is consistent with theories of age-related declines in information processing speed (Glisky, 2007; Salthouse, 1996, 2000) and suggests that performance differences are not due to a speed-accuracy trade off.”

“For some individuals, declines occur earlier or faster and others are better able to maintain their cognitive functioning as they age (1, 3, 5, 6).”

“The processing-speed theory of cognitive aging is a well-established model for conceptualizing age-related cognitive decline (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Prominent theories of cognitive aging posit a central role for reductions in mental processing speed during later life (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Because of age-related cognitive slowing (Salthouse, 1996), it was possible that older participants would not be able to fully process the image primes due to the relatively short stimulus onset asynchrony and thereby show reduced priming effects.”

“Age-related deficits in phonological activation (MacKay & Burke, 1990), competitor inhibition (Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Zacks & Hasher, 1994), and processing speed (T. Salthouse, 1996) have been proposed as distinct cognitive mechanisms to account for age-related increases in word-finding difficulty.”

“Compared to speed, the effect of aging on accuracy of dual task performance is less clear, with previous studies indicating no differences between younger and older adults [18], older adults making more errors [19–22], and older adults making fewer errors [11, 23].”

“Thus, this result demonstrates that the role of reasoning ability is not restricted to nonspatial high-order cognition tasks—as shown by age-difference studies (Salthouse, 1996 , Salthouse & Ferrer-Caja, 2003 )—but can instead be extended to spatial tasks requiring a certain degree of cognitive cost, such as the point…”

“This result is consistent with a large body of research showing the predictive power of slowing on lower level tasks in accounting for age differences on higher level tasks (eg, Salthouse, 1996 ; Verhaeghen & Salthouse, 1997 ), but did not indicate a specific additional role for age-related perceptual and attentional…”

“the negative correlation between age and processing speed (Salthouse, 1996).”

“…function, processing speed has also been promoted by some as a primus inter pares among cognitive domains, in that it has been suggested as a foundation for competence in other cognitive abilities and an influence on how well or badly they age (Jensen, 2006; Salthouse, 1996; Verhaeghen, 2014).”

“…in our sample may have several reasons, either in the reading comprehension component (e.g., due to age-related declines in visual processing speed; Salthouse, 1996), or in the speech production component of reading aloud where agerelated declines in speech motor execution have been observed…”

“Second, no data were collected regarding the working-memory or processing-speed performance of the ON adults (Salthouse, 1996).”

“For instance, Dunlosky and Salthouse (1996) presented participants with a 15-item word list across five trials, revealing minimal improvement in recall accuracy between Trial 4 and Trial 5 (asymptote between 85% and 90%).”

“정보처리속도 역시 노화와 함께 저하 되어 노인들은 특정 과제를 수행할 때 더 많은 시간이 소요된다 (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Salthouse (1996) suggested that this reflected a cognitive slowdown, where older participants were slower because cognitive abilities decrease with age.”

“These results are in general accordance with previous studies showing age-related declines in cognitive speed, attention and executive functioning (Royall et al., 2004; Salthouse, 1996, 2016).”

“Processing speed has been found to explain a substantial proportion of the performance variability in higherorder cognitive abilities, such as working memory, or executive functioning (Schaie, 1989; Salthouse, 1996; Verhaeghen and Salthouse, 1997; Zimprich and Martin, 2002).”

“…adults, who experience reduced processing efficiency and diminished working memory capacity (e.g., Hashtroudi et al., 1990; Hedden & Park, 2001; Salthouse, 1996), being asked to engage in the split attention, resource heavy MRC task may lessen the resources available for searching, retrieving,…”

“Psychomotor speed was assessed with the letter and pattern comparison tasks (Salthouse, 1996).”

“In fact, the mean number of answers given by the speakers in 10 s could be influenced in elderly subjects by slower processing speed (e.g., Salthouse, 1996), rather than by the characteristics of the mental lexicon.”

“139 We chose these measures based upon availability and 140 because processing speed has been proven to be more 141 sensitive to age-related changes than, for example, 142 global measures of cognition such as the Mini-Mental 143 State Examination (MMSE), and memory problems 144 are one of the most common complaints at…”

“processing speed has long been recognised as the most commonly affected cognitive ability with ageing(34) and a leading indicator of changes in memory in older adults.(34,35) Decreased processing speed may increase the likelihood of experiencing subjective”

“Several lines of research suggest age-related declines in the controlled processes of the deliberative system such as decreased speed of processing (e.g., Salthouse, 1996 ), and deficits in explicit memory and learning (Cohen, 1996).”

“In many different cognitive domains (e.g., perception, memory, attention, reasoning), a substantial proportion of age differences can be explained by cognitive slowing (Cerella, 1985; Salthouse, 1996).”

“Our analytic approach is similar to how Salthouse ( 1996 ) used processing speed, an ability that is correlated with age, as the mediating factor between age and task performance.”

“Another cognitive process that affects the performance of older adults is the speed of the learning process, which decreases with increasing age (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Slowness by itself may lead to EF problems (cf. Salthouse 1996; 2005).”

“Given the central role of processing speed in higher cognitive functions (Salthouse, 1996; Fry and Hale, 2000), and its core importance for many aspects of performance in school, any evidence for differences in performance between boys and girls may have important implications for education.”

“…of Nottingham, UK Reviewed by: Sven Obermeyer, Goethe University Frankfurt Am Main, Germany David Andrew Ross, Vanderbilt, USA *Correspondence: Bozana Meinhardt-Injac, Section for Developmental and Educational Psychology, Department of Psychology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Wallstr.”

“It is well established that general processing speed is an important, if not the most important, determinant of cognitive aging (e.g., Fisk & Warr, 1996; Salthouse, 1993, 1996, 2000).”

“A further theory relating to ageing executive control states that inhibitory performance decrements are not abolished but merely delayed by normal ageing (Salthouse, 1996; Andres, Parmentier & Escera, 2006).”

“One possible explanation for the obtained differences is that short study durations did not allow older adults to sufficiently process items during encoding because of their slower processing speed (cf. Salthouse, 1996).”

“…that they or closely related instruments are highly sensitive to aging (Cerella, 1985, 1990; Graf & Uttl, 1995; Kausler, 1991, 1994; Rabbit, 1965; Salthouse, 1985, 1988, 1996; Uttl & Graf, 1999a, 1999b; Uttl, Graf, Miller, & McIssac, in press), to depression (Hart, Kwentus, Wade, & Hamer, 1987;…”

“Salthouse, 1996 ; Salthouse & Babcock, 1991 ; Salthouse & Meinz, 1995 ).”

“Originally advanced byBirren (1964), Salthouse (1996)presented a case that slowed cognitive processing accounts for some of the decrement observed in measures of Type A or fluid cognition – of which Digit–Symbol is a classic example.”

“Sherman and Frost (2000) obtained findings in line with the findings of Ybarra and colleagues (1999).”

“Numerous research studies and empirical observations indicate that mental faculties tend to decline as individuals age, making older adults more vulnerable to cognitive issues like cognitive dysfunction ( Salthouse, 1996 ; Van Hooren et al., 2007 ).”