Patterns of Rumination by Young and Older Adults

A lot of attention has been given to the negative effects of both inhibitory deficits and rumination but little work has compared both: research on inhibitory deficits has focused on older adults whereas research on rumination has focused on young adults. This study examined the pattern of rumination by both young and older adults and compared rumination to working memory, inhibition, and mood. Based on findings from a small pilot study, it was hypothesized that older adults would ruminate less often than young adults and that the structure of rumination by young and older adults would differ, including the relationship between rumination, working memory, inhibition, and mood. These hypotheses were supported. Older adults reported less rumination than young adults and older adults' rumination could be modeled as a unitary construct whereas young adults' rumination was composed of two forms of rumination, a tendency toward brooding and reflection versus a more general form of rumination on sadness. The relationships between rumination and working memory, inhibition, and mood also change with age. Older adults' rumination was not associated with inhibitory deficits whereas both forms of rumination by young adults were. The implications of these findings for theories of inhibitory deficits and emotional regulation are discussed

Aging and the vulnerability of speech to dual task demands

This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.Tracking a digital pursuit rotor task was used to measure dual task costs of language production by young and older adults. Tracking performance by both groups was affected by dual task demands: time on target declined and tracking error increased as dual task demands increased from the baseline condition to a moderately demanding dual task condition to a more demanding dual task condition. When dual task demands were moderate, older adults' speech rate declined but their fluency, grammatical complexity, and content were unaffected. When the dual task was more demanding, older adults' speech, like young adults' speech, became highly fragmented, ungrammatical, and incoherent. Vocabulary, working memory, processing speed, and inhibition affected vulnerability to dual task costs: vocabulary provided some protection for sentence length and grammaticality, working memory conferred some protection for grammatical complexity, and processing speed provided some protection for speech rate, propositional density, coherence, and lexical diversity. Further, vocabulary and working memory capacity provided more protection for older adults than for young adults although the protective effect of processing speed was somewhat reduced for older adults as compared to the young adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved

The Effects of Varying Task Priorities on Language Production by Young and Older Adults

The present study compared how varying task priorities affected young and older adults' language production. Both young and older adults responded to monetary incentives to vary their performance when simultaneously talking and tracking a pursuit rotor. Tracking performance improved when they were rewarded for tracking and declined when they were rewarded for talking. Both young and older adults also spoke more slowly when rewarded for tracking and more rapidly when rewarded for talking. Young produced less complex sentences when rewarded for tracking and produced more complex sentences when rewarded for talking. However, older adults did not vary their grammatical complexity as a function of monetary incentives. These results are consistent with prior studies suggesting that older adults use a simplified speech register in response to dual-task demands

Tracking Talking: Dual Task Costs of Planning and Producing Speech for Young versus Older Adults

A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor speech planning and production costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were describing someone they admire. The speech sample and time-locked tracking record were segmented at utterance boundaries and multilevel modeling was used to determine how utterance-level predictors such as utterance duration or sentence grammatical complexity and person-level predictors such as speaker age or working memory capacity predicted tracking performance. Three models evaluated the costs of speech planning, the costs of speech production, and the costs of speech output monitoring. The results suggest that planning and producing propositionally dense utterances is more costly for older adults and that older adults experience increased costs as a result of having produced a long, informative, or rapid utterance

Dual Task Costs of Oral Reading for Young versus Older Adults

A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor oral reading costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were reading out short paragraphs. Multilevel modeling was used to determine how paragraph-level predictors of length, grammatical complexity, and readability and person-level predictors such as speaker age or working memory capacity predicted reading and tracking performance. In addition, sentence-by-sentence variation in tracking performance was examined during the production of individual sentences and during the pauses before upcoming sentences. The results suggest that dual tasking has a greater impact on older adults’ reading comprehension and tracking performance. At the level of individual sentences, young and older adults adopt different strategies to deal with grammatically complex and propositionally dense sentences

Tracking Reading: Dual Task Costs of Oral Reading for Young Versus Older Adults

A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor oral reading costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were reading out short paragraphs. Multilevel modeling was used to determine how paragraph-level predictors of length, grammatical complexity, and readability and person-level predictors such as speaker age or working memory capacity predicted reading and tracking performance. In addition, sentence-by-sentence variation in tracking performance was examined during the production of individual sentences and during the pauses before upcoming sentences. The results suggest that dual tasking has a greater impact on older adults’ reading comprehension and tracking performance. At the level of individual sentences, young and older adults adopt different strategies to deal with grammatically complex and propositionally dense sentences.This research was supported in part by grants from the NIH to the University of Kansas through the Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, grant number P30 HD-002528, and the Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communication Disorders (BNCD), grant number P30 DC-005803 as well as by grant RO1 AG-025906 from the National Institute on Aging to Susan Kemper. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. We thank Ruth Herman for her assistance with data collection and analysis. A suite of digital pursuit rotor applications is available upon request

Age differences in dual task performance: Validating the use of the pursuit rotor

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Kansas, Psychology, 2007.To validate a digital pursuit rotor task as a measure for dual task research, young (n=40) and older (n=40) adults were asked to produce language samples while engaged in the pursuit-rotor task. Young adults tracked faster at baseline and in dual task conditions. Young adults also spoke more rapidly than the older adults at baseline and in most dual task conditions. In task priority conditions, young adults appeared to be able to change their performance to match the priority whereas older adults’ performance did not change in task priority conditions. Advantages of the rotor over other dual task measures are discussed