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Aging and Longitudinal Change in Perceptual-Motor Skill Acquisition in Healthy Adults

Institute of Gerontology and Department of Psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

Address correspondence to Naftali Raz, Institute of Gerontology, 226 Knapp Building, 87 E. Ferry St., Detroit MI 48202. E-mail: nraz{at}wayne.edu

Knowledge about aging of perceptual-motor skills is based almost exclusively on cross-sectional studies. We examined age-related changes in the retention of mirror-tracing skills in healthy adults who practiced for 3 separate days at baseline and retrained 5 years later at follow-up. Overall, the speed and accuracy of an acquired skill were partially retained after a 5-year interim, although the same asymptote was reached. Analyses with individual learning curves indicated that the effects of age on mirror-tracing speed were greater at longitudinal follow-up than at baseline, with older adults requiring more training to reach asymptote. Thus, although the long-term retention of acquired skills declines with age, older adults still retain the ability to learn the skill. Moreover, those who maintained a processing speed comparable with that of the younger participants evidenced no age-related performance decrements on the mirror-drawing task.

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