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ABSTRACT
This study examined the contributions of general slowing and task-specific deficits to age-related changes in Stroop interference. Nine hundred thirty-eight participants aged 20 to 89 years completed an abbreviated Stroop color-naming task and a subset of 281 participants also completed card-sorting, simple reaction time, and choice reaction time tasks. Age-related increases in incongruent color-naming latency and card-sorting perseverative errors were observed. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that the processing speed measures accounted for significant variance on both dependent measures, but that there was also a significant residual effect of age. An additional regression analysis showed that some of the variance in incongruent color-naming, after controlling for processing speed, was shared with the variance in perseverative errors. Overall, findings suggest that the age difference in Stroop interference is partially attributable to general slowing, but is also attributable to age-related changes in task-specific processes such as inhibitory control.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research was partially supported by the Veterans Administration Medical Research Division, Associate Investigator Program.
Notes
1 In the reduced sample, groups attained a similar level of education, p > .05.
2 Parallel analyses were conducted using a subset of the participants who completed the Rey verbal memory test as part of the neuropsychological battery, after removing participants whose scores on the memory test were more than two standard deviations below the mean. This served to screen participants with large memory impairments. Results were nearly identical to those observed with the full sample with the same significant effects.
