An evaluation of warning habits and beliefs across the adult life span.

Beliefs about warnings and habits associated with reading them were assessed for 863 individuals of various ages. Information gathered for various common household products included (a) how frequently people attend to warning information, (b) the degree of risk they believe is involved during product usage, and (c) how important they believe warnings are for different product types. Also assessed were perceived helpfulness and comprehension for symbols commonly found on product labels or on signs in the environment. Respondents 55 years and older reported reading product warnings more frequently than did younger adults, although they generally perceived warnings as less important. However, no overall age-related differences were found for perceived level of risk involved in using different product types. Although older adults generally perceived symbols to be very helpful when using a particular product, their comprehension levels were poorer than those of younger adults for half of the symbols. Overall, these data suggest that adults of all ages do read warnings on a variety of product types and that they believe warning information is important. This research illustrates the importance of including older adults in usability studies during the development of warning systems, given age-related effects may be associated with some aspects of the warning processing but not others.

Normative data for equivalent, parallel forms of the Judgment of Line Orientation Test.

The Judgment of Line Orientation Test (JLO; Benton, Hamsher, Varney, & Spreen, 1983) permits assessment of visuospatial processing without making demands on motor skills. However, its administration can be time-intensive and frustrating for patients, particularly when used in a geriatric population. We present a single set of normative data to be used for both the odd-item and even-item forms derived from Form V of the JLO based on responses from a healthy geriatric sample. Mean scores and distributions of odd-item and even-item forms were nearly identical, and both forms showed significant correlations with the Developmental Test of Visual- Motor Integration. Cross-validation using the odd form of the JLO on an independent sample from a different geographic location suggested good generalizability of the normative data. We conclude that these JLO short-form normative data may be used in clinical screening situations or when serial assessments are needed.

Controlled and automatic forms of memory and attention: process purity and the uniqueness of age-related influences.

Estimates of controlled and automatic processes hypothesized to underlie performance in a memory task and in an attention task were derived for 115 participants from 18 to 78 years of age using the process-dissociation procedure. Participants also performed speed and neuropsychological tests that were suspected to be negatively related to age. Process estimates showed good reliability (from .76 to .98), and the qualitative distinction between processes was supported by the overall pattern of correlations among measures. However, only estimated automatic processes exhibited unique variance, as they were either weakly related or unrelated both to performance on the other tests and to each other. Estimates of the control processes, in contrast, shared considerable variance with measures from other tests, and there were no unique, or independent, age-related effects on these measures. The results highlight the need to distinguish between process purity and the uniqueness of age-related influences in accounting for age differences in cognition.

Interrelations of age, visual acuity, and cognitive functioning.

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.