The effect of ageing on confrontation naming in healthy older adults: a three-level meta-analysis

ABSTRACT

Older adults frequently report trouble retrieving words, which is often tested by confrontation naming tasks. However, with inconsistencies among the relevant literature, this ageing effect requires an updated meta-analysis (with the only meta-analysis conducted in 1997), especially when no meta-analysis has been conducted on how such an effect may be modulated by the important factor of education. By synthesizing 41 primary studies, the present meta-analysis revealed a significant ageing effect on confrontation naming (indexed by accuracy), which was modulated by participant age and education. First, a significant ageing effect only occurred in participants aged 70 and above (compared with participants below 60). Second, participants with low- and middle-level education exhibited significantly larger ageing effects than those with high-level education. Third, for the age-and-education interaction, an ageing effect occurred as early as 60 in participants in the low-and-middle education level, while this critical age for participants with high-level education is 70.

KEYWORDS:

• Confrontation naming
• older adults
• ageing
• education
• meta-analysis

Data availability statement

The data and the R script to implement the present meta-analysis could be accessed via Mendeley Data (doi: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/4pzbv8rvmm/1).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We identified two possible factors that may help explain the presence of the two outliers. In Schmitter-Edgecombe et al. (2000), several items used in their naming task were found to be in favor of the older participants (see Ashaie & Obler, 2014); and in Marien et al. (1998), the sample sizes of two participant groups were too small (i.e., 7 for the intermediate group and 12 for the older group with matched education).

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by grants to the corresponding author from the Social Science Fund of Zhejiang Higher Education in China (2021GH023), and from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2022YFC3601600).