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Age Differences in Central (Semantic) and Peripheral Processing: The Importance of Considering Both Response Times and Errors

¹ Department of Psychology, The University of Akron, Ohio.
² Department of Physics, Cleveland State University, Ohio.
³ Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.

Address correspondence to Philip Allen, Department of Psychology, The University of Akron, CAS 364, Akron, OH 44325-4301. E-mail: paallen{at}uakron.edu

In this project we examined the effect of adult age on visual word recognition by using combined reaction time (RT) and accuracy methods based on the Hick–Hyman law. This was necessary because separate Brinley analyses of RT and errors resulted in contradicting results. We report the results of a lexical decision task experiment (with 96 younger adults and 97 older adults). We transformed the error data into entropy and then predicted RT by using entropy values separately for exposure duration (thought to influence peripheral processes) and word frequency (thought to influence central processes). For exposure duration, the entropy–RT functions indicate that older adults show higher intercepts and slopes than do younger adults, suggesting an encoding decrement for older adults. However, for word frequency, older adults show higher intercepts but not steeper slopes than younger adults. Older adults thus show a peripheral processing decrement but not a central processing decrement for lexical decision.