Differences between young and old university students on a lexical decision task: evidence through an ex-Gaussian approach.
This work compared two common variants of a lexical decision task (LDT) through two different analysis procedures: first, the classical ANOVA method, and second, by fitting the data to an ex-Gaussian distribution function. Two groups of participants (old and young university students) had to perform, blocks of go/no-go and yes/no tasks. Reaction times and error rates were much lower in the go/no-go task than in the yes/no task. Changes in the ex-Gaussian parameter related to attention were found with word frequency but not with the type of LDT tasks. These findings suggest that word frequency shows an attentional cost that is independent of age.
a Universitat de Valéncia.
Esperanza
E
Navarro-Pardo
Ana Belén
AB
Navarro-Prados
Daniel
D
Gamermann
Carmen
C
Moret-Tatay
D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D016011:Normal Distribution; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014495:Universities; D055815:Young Adult
age-related differences; ex-Gaussian fit; lexical decision task