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Age-Related Differences in Control Processes in Verbal and Visuospatial Working Memory: Storage, Transformation, Supervision, and Coordination

Department of Psychology and Center for Health and Behavior, Syracuse University, New York.

Address correspondence to Kara Bopp, Department of Psychology, Wofford College, 429 N. Church St., Spartanburg, SC 29303. E-mail: boppkl{at}wofford.edu

We explored age differences in transformation, supervision, and coordination processes in verbal and visuospatial repetition-detection tasks. Older adults processed information more slowly and less accurately than did younger adults, especially in the visuospatial task. However, there were no process-specific age-related differences in the visuospatial domain. In the verbal domain, task conditions requiring supervision and coordination showed larger age effects than the baseline or transformation conditions. Taken together, the findings provide support for a process- and domain-specific account of age-related differences in cognitive control, which may be tied to an age-related deficit in the maintenance of two separate sets of representations.