Absence of prefrontal lobe dysfunction indicators in healthy elderly participants: Comparisons with verified prefrontal lobe damage

Abstract

Proficiency (errors) during the Conditioned Spatial Association Task (Milner & Petrides, 1984) was measured for groups of healthy elderly participants, university students, patients with no prefrontal neuropsychological impairment, and patients with prefrontal impairment. The results clearly demonstrated no significant group differences between the first three groups. We conclude that proficiency for tasks that require self‐monitoring, structuring, and temporal ordering does not deteriorate quantitatively in healthy elderly adults. However, we did not assess the speed of information processing.