The role of theories of cognitive aging: comment on Salthouse.
Cognitive models of aging ought, minimally, to simulate age effects for a broad range of tasks, and their underlying assumptions ought to be constrained by existing data on cognitive mechanisms. Salthouse's model (and other parallel distributed-processing network models) meets the first criterion better than it meets the second. Another weakness is in its inability to account for goal-directed behavior. Thus, models like that of Salthouse seem best suited to the description of automatic information processes such as recognition. I conclude that such models are best evaluated in competition with standard symbolic processing models. I introduce simulation of chess position recall by older and younger chess players and compare it with Salthouse's model.
Charness
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Psychology Department, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011582:Psychological Theory