title: Applying Brinley plots to individuals: effects of aging on performance distributions in two speeded tasks.
abstract: This article describes the application of Brinley plots to performance distributions from 2 speeded tasks, namely, letter coding and visual search. Ss were aged either 60 years (n = 111) or 75 years (n = 111). Response times within each age group were ranked and then plotted against each other so that the best 60-year-old was paired with the best 75-year-old, and so on. For both tasks, linear fits to the functions were almost perfect, with slopes greater than 1 and with negative intercepts. Additive and multiplicative models of aging were rejected in favor of a general linear model, with different parameters for the letter coding and visual search tasks.
authors.affiliation: Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, England.
authors.forename: E A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Maylor
authors.forename: P M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Rabbitt
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014888:Wechsler Scales