title: Age effects on response monitoring in a mental-rotation task.
abstract: A mental-rotation task was presented to young (18-28 years) and old (60-76 years) adults to simultaneously assess age-related changes in performance, response monitoring and adaptive behavior. Relative to young participants, older adults were less inclined to adjust their speed at the expense of accuracy. They displayed a larger number of slow errors, smaller error potentials (Ne and Pe), more immediate corrections of errors when detected, and a larger speed reduction on trials following an error. The data suggest that for older adults an increase of task complexity sometimes caused a radical failure in determining the correct response, rather than a gradual reduction of efficiency.
authors.affiliation: Psychonomics, Faculty of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. band@psy.uva.nl
authors.forename: G P
authors.initials: GP
authors.lastname: Band
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kok
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology