Healthy adults' performance on the Austin Maze

Abstract

This paper reports an analysis of performance on an electric pushbutton maze test, known as the Austin Maze. The subjects consisted of a sample of 536 healthy volunteers within the age range 16 to 70, pooled from two published and two unpublished studies and including 163 pairs of same sex twins. Selecting one twin at random from each pair, and using 299 cases, maze scores were regressed on a range of demographic and ability variables. The results showed that age (12% explained variance) and WAIS-R Block Design (23% explained variance) make substantial contributions to scores on the maze, while WAIS-R Vocabulary and the sex of the subject make statistically significant but minor contributions (3% and 1%, respectively). In addition, we found that the cumulative error score from ten trials is an excellent predictor of performance to criterion.