Reaction time as a function of age, anxiety, and typicality

Elderly adults were compared with high and low test-anxious young adults on a task that required deciding whether a word could be considered an instance of the category name shown with it. The words were either typical or atypical members of the category. The elderly adults showed the slowest reaction times for all decisions, and the age difference was proportionally the same for atypical and typical instances. Elderly subjects were more like high-anxiety young adults than like low-anxiety young adults for atypical instances, but elderly subjects were significantly worse than anxious young adults for typical instances and unrelated words. These results offer some support for the role of anxiety in producing the aging performance deficit, but this factor seems insufficient to explain all age-related performance differences.