The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition

“…large literature indicating that (a) faster PS is associated with better performance on WM tasks (Kievit et al., 2016; Nettelbeck & Burns, 2010; Salthouse, 1996), and (b) PS accounts for a substantial amount of variance in performance on many EF tasks, such that reduced PS is positively…”

“Based on previous studies, it is likely that children (Eisenberg et al. 2000) and older adults (Pichora‐Fuller et al. 1995; Salthouse 1996) will show different Copyright © 2019 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. patterns of speech recognition across…”

“Given that onset latency reflects processing speed, the result further suggests that slowing in general processing speed (Salthouse, 1996) may contribute to declines in semantic integration.”

“This finding is supported by Salthouse (1996)’s Processing Speed Theory of Adult Age Differences, according to which the increase in age is typically connected to the reduction in processing speed with which many cognitive operations are executed.”

“However, to address the potential contribution of age-related generalized slowing (Salthouse, 1996) to the observed age-related differences in speeded performance, we examined the relation of mean RT values between young and older adults across experimental conditions (Brinley, 1965; Cerella, 1994).”

“…accepted for publication 11 March 2014 Information processing speed, also referred to as processing speed or mental speed, is a cognitive function that declines during aging (Salthouse 1996) and that is compromised by psychiatric diseases such as depression and schizophrenia (Luciano et al. 2011).”

“Researchers in cognitive aging have long known that many cognitive processes decline with age, as demonstrated by declining performance on memory and speeded tasks (e.g., Kail & Salthouse, 1996).”

“Regarding processing speed, Salthouse (1996) proposed two mechanisms, which may help explain individual differences in task-specific PA learning of older adults due to lower processing speed: the limited time and the simultaneity mechanism.”

“for possible age-related influences (Salthouse, 1996).”

“, 2011) and processing efficiency of responding in environments with great exposure (Salthouse, 1996; RodríguezVillagra, Göthe, Oberauer, & Kliegl, 2013).”

“Another example is when failure occurs because information essential for completing the task is not available in time (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Much available evidence supports an effect of processing time increase on working memory capacity decrease (e.g. Salthouse, 1991, 1992, 1996); but other explanations have also been suggested, such as reduced resistance to interference (e.g. Dempster, 1992; Hasher & Zachs, 1988), reduced attentional…”

“, Anderson, Craik, & Naveh-Benjamin, 1998; Lindenberger, Marsiske, & Baltes, 2000) or limiting the time available to complete encoding operations (e.g., Paivo & Csapo, 1969; Salthouse, 1996; Simon, 1979) younger adults’ memory performance often reflects that typically observed in aging.”

“This is because reasoning ability has been shown to decrease over time due to diminishing speed of processing beyond the age of 20 (Salthouse 1996; Nettelbeck and Burns 2010).”

“Equally, the information processing of older adults, which tend to be slower than younger demographics (Salthouse 1994, 1996), could have made their abilities to recognise DBAs less effective, impacting on the mean score of Gen X. Neverthe-less, the gender results obtained in the current research…”

“Salthouse 1996 claimed the declining speed at which older adults process information results in much of this information being lost when it needs to be retrieved.”

“Numerous research projects and real-life observations have shown that mental abilities decrease as a person ages, and older individuals are more susceptible to problems with cognition, such as cognitive impairment [2, 3].”

“…working memory capacity, and inhibition (i.e., the attentional ability to suppress or ignore ongoing irrelevant thoughts and actions to achieve current goals) would be the basic mechanisms that would explain the age-related changes in cognitive performance in older people, e.g., [73–76].”

“Older adults also tend to have declines in cognitive abilities, like processing speed and memory (Craik, 1994; Henninger et al., 2010; Salthouse, 1996; Salthouse, 2004).”

“Executive Functioning (EF) and Processing Speed (PS) are foundational for many complex cognitive functions, and worsening performance in these domains has been hypothesized to play a dominant role in cognitive decline (e.g., Reynolds et al., 2009; Salthouse, 1996, 2000).”

“Developed to help categorize different kinds of cognitive function, the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence can help conceptualize cognition changes as we age and, in turn, how socioeconomic resources may influence those relationships (Horn and Cattell 1967; Salthouse 1996).”

“The letter comparison test was adapted from a paper-and-pencil task developed by Salthouse and colleagues (Earles & Salthouse, 1995; Salthouse, 1996).”

“, associated with value beliefs) in the older age group may indicate noisy neural information processing of value representations and comparison (Li et al., 2001; Salthouse, 1996).”

“Slowerresponsesmay also be due to slower processing speed that occurs with increasing age as response time increased with increasing cognitive demands [71].”

“Our observed changes in RLWM parameters, phi and alpha, agree with the notion of processing speed (Salthouse, 1996; Eckert, 2011; Albinet et al., 2012).”

“Cognitive aging brings about changes in mental function, such as slower processing speeds, diminished working memory capacity, and declining inhibitory function (Connelly et al., 1991; Park et al., 2002; Salthouse, 1990, 1996).”

“Age-related Age-related neural dedifferentiation has been linked to slower speed with which individuals make judgments about the perceived stimuli (Park et al., 2002; Salthouse, 1996).”

“extent to which the health model accounted for age-related cognitive variations, we applied the following formula proposed by Salthouse (1996): a = (b − c)/b, where a is the explained age-related variance, b is the amount of variance in cognition accounted for by age if entered alone in the regression model, and c is…”

“Despite the known agerelated declines in bottom-up processes and some top-down processes (e.g., Salthouse, 1996), top-down attentional control is well preserved with aging (e.g., Atchley & Hoffman, 2004; Costello, Madden, Shepler, Mitroff, & Leber, 2010; Madden, Spaniol, Bucur, & Whiting, 2007;…”

“Because increasing levels of internal neural noise(1) with age have been identified as a possible cause of age-related slowing on a variety of cognitive tasks (Allen, Groth, Weber, & Madden, 1993; Birren, 1965; Madden, 2001; Salthouse, 1996), it may be that increased internal noise levels multiplicatively compound pro…”

“This hypothesis postulates cognition as being driven by a processing rate, and presumes that the rate of processing-speed in older adults is less than in younger adults [11,12].”

“This finding is consistent with a large body of literature, suggesting that older adults show age-related response slowing in cognitive tasks (Salthouse, 1996).”

“It has been the general consensus that perceptual ability decline over time (e.g., Kail and Salthouse, 1994) and that it may be related to decline in cognitive processing speed (Salthouse, 1996; Finkel et al., 2007).”

“Some shuttle cars have a compatible control-response relationship when going in one direction, but when traveling in the other direction the relationship is incompatible (that is, a clockwise rotation results in the vehicle turning left and a counter-clockwise rotation steers the vehicle right).”

“It is suggested that older adults are more apt to rely on heuristics because they are either unable or unwilling to expend their more limited cognitive resources to effortfully process the task (Gigerenzer, 2003; see Salthouse, 1996 for a description of cognitive resources that decline with age).”

“Long-term memory and processing speed have been welldocumented (e.g., Gutchess 2010; John and Cole 1986; Mather 2010; Nielsen and Mather 2011; Salthouse 1996; Salthouse 2009; C. Yoon 1997; C. Yoon et al. 2005).”

“Accumulated research indicates that processing speed plays a moderate to substantial role in accounting for the decline in fluid reasoning across the adult life span (Clay et al., 2009; Finkel, Reynolds, McArdle, & Pedersen, 2007; Salthouse, 1996).”

“This is consistent with the processing speed theory of adult aging, which hypothesizes a general decrease in processing speed that is associated with increasing age, and that affects all cognitive processes (Salthouse 1996).”

“Also, despite abundant fluid cognitive capacities (Salthouse, 1996) and a tendency toward global processing during younger adulthood (Oken et al., 1999; Schwarzer et al., 2010), less agreeable individuals may lack the motivation to invest these potentials for effectively reading group emotions.”

“It has been debated that ageing is accompanied with a general slowing of motor, cognitive and perceptual functions (e.g., Birren, 1965; Birren, 1974; Birren & Fisher, 1995; Cerella, 1985; Cerella & Hale, 1994; Li & Lindenberger, 2002; Salthouse, 1996).”

“, general slowing (Salthouse, 1996), reduced working memory capacity (Bopp & Verhaeghen, 2005), and executive functioning (Kramer, Hahn, & Gopher, 1999), applied research has identified significant increases in attentional demand for older relative to younger participants in simulator and field studies where drivers c…”

“…Bunting, Hambrick, Wilhelm & Engle, 2005), intelligence, inhibition, processing speed and shifting (e.g., Kyllonen & Christal, 1990; Miyake & Shah, 1999; Schmiedek, Oberauer, Wilhelm, Süss & Wittmann, 2007) prone to age-related cognitive decline (e.g., Craik & Bialystok, 2006; Salthouse, 1996).”

“In this regard the lack of a significant effect for oxidative stress on DT is surprising considering that speed of processing is considered by a number of authors to be a core ability that declines with aging and explains similar declines across other more heterogeneous cognitive tests [28,62].”

“These include declines in processing speed (Salthouse, 1996; Charness, 2008), selective attention (Barr and Giambra, 1990; Madden, 1990), working memory (WM) (Balota et al., 2000; Zacks et al., 2000), and task-switching (Kray and Lindenberger, 2000; Kray et al., 2002).”

“Processing of information occurs at a slower speed in older relative to younger adults and accounts for a substantial portion of age-related decline on various cognitive tasks (Salthouse, 1996).”

“…for cognitive abilities, including episodic memory (Park et al., 1996), working memory (Bopp & Verhaeghen, 2005), processing speed (Eckert, 2011; Salthouse, 1996; Salthouse & Madden, 2013), reasoning (Schaie, 1996), and AU1 AU2 B. R. Payne (*) Department of Psychology, Neuroscience Program,…”

“This finding is inconsistent with work that suggests processing speed may be an important component in verbal memory processing (Salthouse, 1996).”

“Our results are consistent with previous findings that older adults have slower verbal abilities, processing speed, and set-shifting than young adults, reinforcing the theorized age-related decline in these processes (Gold & Arbuckle, 1995; Horton et al., 2010; Salthouse, 1996; Tremblay et al., 2018).”

“, 2013), execution speed (Commodari & Guarnera, 2008), processing speed (Salthouse, 1996) and sensory processing (e.”

“Specifically, and in line with a general slowdown in processing (Salthouse, 1996), we expect that older adults will exhibit significantly slower RTs and overall lower accuracy in the primary task.”

“Verbal fluency, i.e., the ability to spontaneously generate as many words as possible within a given category, is associated with the size or depth of the available mental lexicon (Salthouse, 1996; Sauzéon et al., 2011).”

“The generalized cognitive slowing (Salthouse, 1996, 1999) and perceptual deficits that affect vision and hearing (DeDe and Knilans, 2016; Whitson et al., 2018; Mick et al., 2021), which could be related to slower responses, might continue to increase even late in life.”

“…loss affecting frontal systems early in aging, and therefore, impacting complex attention, processing speed (processing speed theory of aging; Salthouse, 1996), executive function (inhibitory deficit theory of aging; Hasher & Zacks, 1988), and normal age-related cognitive changes lead to…”

“For example, the general slowing theory (or global-speed theory) states that the speed of executive cognitive operations decreases with aging, regardless of the type of task or the mental operations involved in the task ([8] [9]) which causes an increase in time to perform the task and an increase in the error rate.”

“These behavioural data support that there is a gradation in the cognitive demands in the different response categories, and that this modulates the RT, in accordance with “the complexity effect” observed in previous studies (Band and Kok, 2000; Salthouse, 1996; Yordanova et al., 2004).”

“Many behavioural and cognitive neuroscience studies have shown significant declines in certain cognitive processes with ageing (e.g., Baltes & Lindenberger, 1997; Nilsson, 2003; Park, Polk, Mikels, Taylor, & Marshuetz, 2001; Salthouse, 1996).”

“For instance, the processing speed of cognitive tasks (e.g., letter comparison and pattern comparison) and their acuity decrease from young adulthood towards old age (Salthouse 1996, 1999; Baltes and Lindenberger 1997).”

“It is generally well known that many of our cognitive and perceptual functions decline as we age [9], however the extent of the age-related decline and the intra-individual variability remains unclear.”

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“As would be expected from the reduced processing speed hypothesis (Salthouse, 1996), the correlation between age and overall recognition,”

“It is also well known that the decrease in intellectual performance in old age is mainly attributable to a decrease in ‘‘fluid’’ aspects of intelligence (Bashore, Ridderinkhof, & van der Molen, 1998; Salthouse, 1996), the component closest to openness.”