Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 51, Issue 6 P317-P330, Copyright © 1996 by The Gerontological Society of America

ARTICLES

Interrelations of age, visual acuity, and cognitive functioning

TA Salthouse, HE Hancock, EJ Meinz and DZ Hambrick
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.

It has recently been suggested that a large proportion of the age- related influences on many measures of cognitive functioning is mediated through a single common factor. This hypothesis has been supported by the discovery that much of the age-related variance in different cognitive measures is shared, and is not distinct or independent. These earlier results were replicated in this project, and it was also discovered that measures of corrected visual acuity and processing speed share a very large proportion of the age-related variance in measures of working memory, associative learning, and concept identification. The apparent implication is that the common factor that appears to contribute to age-related differences in many cognitive measures is quite broad and may reflect a relatively general reduction in central nervous system functioning.

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