![]() ![]() A potential explanation for the link between sensory and cognitive decline was provided by Baltes and Lindenberger ( 1997) who concluded that sensory and cognitive function are both likely to be an expression of the “physiological architecture of the aging brain” (p. Though these theories may sometimes be considered as competing theories, they are relatively similar in suggesting a strong age induced interaction between declines in sensory function i.e., vision and audition, and a slowing in cognitive processing speed. However, despite the natural decline in motor speed and function with age, the extent that motor function affects age-related performance on such tasks has not been analyzed in detail.Ĭurrent theories of processing speed and age include the Sensory Deprivation hypothesis, the Common-Cause hypothesis, and the Information Degradation hypothesis. Such tests are reported to measure working memory, psychomotor and visuomotor processing speed, visual discrimination and attention See Holdnack et al. Neuropsychological testing has traditionally assessed processing speed across the lifespan with paper-and-pencil tests such as the Symbol Search and Coding tasks from the Information Processing Speed Index of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) (Wechsler, 2008) i.e., Cornelis et al. The implications of the results are crucial in the realm of aging research, and caution against the use of traditional WAIS tasks with a clinical population where motor speed may be compromised, as in stroke.Ĭognitive processing speed when defined as the ability to process information rapidly, is closely related to the ability to perform higher-order cognitive tasks (Lichtenberger and Kaufman, 2012) and is often assumed to be the core issue responsible for deficits in performance on complex cognitive measures in aging populations (Salthouse, 1996 Salthouse and Ferrer-Caja, 2003). This demonstrates that although much of past research into cognitive decline with age is confounded by use of motor reaction times as the operational measure, significant age differences in cognitive processing also exist on more complex tasks. Furthermore, controlling for motor dexterity did not remove significant age-group differences on the paper-and-pencil measures. ![]() ![]() However, no significant differences or correlations were seen between age groups and the simple visual perception IT task. As expected, results indicated that age group differences were highly significant on the motor dexterity, Symbol Search and Coding tasks. Participants were 67 young university students aged between 18 and 29 (59 females), and 40 older adults aged between 40 and 81 (31 females) primarily with a similar education profile. Thus, the aim of the current study was to explore the contribution of hand motor speed to traditional paper-and-pencil measures of processing speed and to a simple computer-customized non-motor perception decision task, the Inspection Time (IT) task. This is potentially problematic with populations where deficits in motor performance are expected, i.e., in aging or stroke populations. Traditional neuropsychological measurement of cognitive processing speed with tasks such as the Symbol Search and Coding subsets of the WAIS-IV, consistently show decline with advancing age.
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