Date of Award:

5-1989

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Psychology

Committee Chair(s)

Carl D. Cheney

Committee

Carl D. Cheney

Committee

Michael Bertoch

Committee

Grayson Osborne

Committee

Nile Meservy

Committee

William Stinner

Abstract

The reaction time of four groups of elderly human subjects were examined to determine the effects of stimulus presentation and task practice. Each group practiced different tasks, each requiring a response when more than one alternative was available. Two tasks involved making responses based on either visually or auditorily presented stimuli only. One task required decisions to be made on the basis of both auditory and visual stimuli. The fourth group acted as a comparison group and did not practice a reaction-time task; although they did perform a task on the computer and their reaction times were measured. Before and after practicing these tasks, each group was given a single trial involving a completely different decision-making task, and reaction time was measured. Results show that practice led to decreased reaction times on the practiced task in all treatment groups. The comparison group did not improve. Practicing any of the three reaction time tasks also led to decreased reaction time on the unpracticed task. These findings indicate that elderly individuals can decrease their reaction time with practice and that after practicing one task, changes will generalize to a different task. If the older population can alter performance on this task, then they may also be capable of altering performance on other tasks.

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2d09af91996299e5bf8c0a2cfbf3e01c

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