Sandra Hale - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Sandra Hale
Ear and Hearing, May 1, 2019
Objective:The overall goal of this study was to compare verbal and visuo-spatial working memory i... more Objective:The overall goal of this study was to compare verbal and visuo-spatial working memory in children with normal hearing (NH) and with cochlear implants (CI). The main questions addressed by this study were: 1) Does auditory deprivation result in global or domain-specific deficits in working memory in children with CIs compared to their NH age-mates? 2) Does the potential for verbal recoding affect performance on measures of reasoning ability in children with CIs relative to their NH age-mates? 3) Is performance on verbal and visuo-spatial working memory tasks related to spoken receptive language level achieved by children with CIs?Design:A total of 54 children ranging in age from 5–9 years participated; 25 children with CIs and 29 children with NH. Participants were tested on both simple and complex measures of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory. Vocabulary was assessed with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and reasoning abilities with two subtests of the WISC-IV: Picture Concepts (verbally mediated) and Matrix Reasoning (visuo-spatial task). Groups were compared on all measures using analysis of variance (ANOVA) after controlling for age and maternal education.Results:Children with CIs scored significantly lower than children with NH on measures of working memory, after accounting for age and maternal education. Differences between the groups were more apparent for verbal working memory compared to visuo-spatial working memory. For reasoning and vocabulary, the CI group scored significantly lower than the NH group for PPVT and Picture Concepts, but similar to NH age mates on Matrix Reasoning.Conclusions:Results from this study suggest that children with CIs have deficits in working memory related to storing and processing verbal information in working memory. These deficits extend to receptive vocabulary and verbal reasoning and remain even after controlling for the higher maternal education level of the NH group. Their ability to store and process visuo-spatial information in WM and complete reasoning tasks that minimize verbal labeling of stimuli more closely approaches performance of NH age mates
Memory, Apr 18, 2018
People can rehearse to-be-remembered locations either overtly, using eye movements, or covertly, ... more People can rehearse to-be-remembered locations either overtly, using eye movements, or covertly, using only shifts of spatial attention. The present study examined whether the effectiveness of these two strategies depends on environmental support for rehearsal. In Experiment 1, when environmental support (i.e., the array of possible locations) was present and participants could engage in overt rehearsal during retention intervals, longer intervals resulted in larger spans, whereas in Experiment 2, when support was present but participants could only engage in covert rehearsal, longer intervals resulted in smaller spans. When environmental support was absent, however, longer retention intervals resulted in smaller memory spans regardless of which rehearsal strategies were available. In Experiment 3, analyses of participants' eye movements revealed that the presence of support increased participants' fixations of to-be-remembered target locations more than fixations of nontargets, and that this was associated with better memory performance. Further, although the total time fixating targets increased, individual target fixations were actually briefer. Taken together, the present findings suggest that in the presence of environmental support, overt rehearsal is more effective than covert rehearsal at maintaining to-be-remembered locations in working memory, and that having more time for overt rehearsal can actually increase visuospatial memory spans.
PLOS ONE, 2021
The present study examined individual characteristics potentially associated with changes in miti... more The present study examined individual characteristics potentially associated with changes in mitigation behaviors (social distancing and hygiene) recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Analysis of online survey responses from 361 adults, ages 20–78, with US IP addresses, identified significant correlates of adaptive behavioral changes, with implications for preventive strategies and mental health needs. The extent to which individuals changed their mitigation behaviors was unrelated to self-rated health or concern regarding the personal effects of COVID-19 but was related to concern regarding the effects of the pandemic on others. Thus, mitigation behaviors do not appear to be primarily motivated by self-protection. Importantly, adaptive changes in mitigation behaviors increased with age. However, these changes, particularly those related to the frequency of close proximity encounters, appear to be due to age-related decreases in anxiety and depression. Taken...
Experimental Aging Research, 2021
Background: This study addresses two issues: Whether age-related differences in working memory (W... more Background: This study addresses two issues: Whether age-related differences in working memory (WM) can be studied in online samples, and whether such differences reflect an inhibitory deficit. Currently, the evidence is mixed, but the playing field was not level because traditional statistics cannot provide evidence for the null hypothesis. Experiment 1: MTurk workers (ages 19-74) performed simple and complex visuospatial WM tasks to determine whether a secondary task affected the rate of age-related decline. Performance on both tasks replicated previous laboratory studies, establishing that age-related differences in WM can be studied online. Bayesian analyses revealed it is ten times as likely that there is no inhibitory deficit on visuospatial WM tasks as that there is. Experiment 2: The effects of irrelevant location information on visuospatial WM were examined in older (M age = 64.0) and younger (M age = 25.0) MTurk workers. Irrelevant locations produced interference, but both groups were equally affected. Bayesian analyses provided support for the null hypothesis of no age difference. Conclusions: The results of both experiments on working memory not only revealed equivalent visuospatial inhibitory function in older and younger adults, they also demonstrated that age-related differences in visuospatial WM can be effectively studied online as well as in the laboratory.
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2015
Whereas the energetic and informational masking effects of unintelligible babble on auditory spee... more Whereas the energetic and informational masking effects of unintelligible babble on auditory speech recognition are well established, the present study is the first to investigate its effects on visual speech recognition. Young and older adults performed two lipreading tasks while simultaneously experiencing either quiet, speech-shaped noise, or 6-talker background babble. Both words at the end of uninformative carrier sentences and key words in everyday sentences were harder to lipread in the presence of babble than in the presence of speech-shaped noise or quiet. Contrary to the inhibitory deficit hypothesis of cognitive aging, babble had equivalent effects on young and older adults. In a follow-up experiment, neither the babble nor the speech-shaped noise stimuli interfered with performance of a face-processing task, indicating that babble selectively interferes with visual speech recognition and not with visual perception tasks per se. The present results demonstrate that babble can produce cross-modal informational masking and suggest a breakdown in audiovisual scene analysis, either because of obligatory monitoring of even uninformative speech sounds or because of obligatory efforts to integrate speech sounds even with uncorrelated mouth movements.
The Psychological Record, 2015
Three experiments assessed the use of online samples recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (M... more Three experiments assessed the use of online samples recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) worker pool for studying the psychology of aging. The results replicated several. benchmark findings: Older adults’ response times (RTs) improved more with practice, but their asymptotic RTs remained longer than those of the younger adults (Experiment 1); greater age-related declines were observed in visuospatial processing speed than in verbal speed (Experiment 2); and although working memory decreased with age, age was not a significant predictor of working memory once processing speed was statistically controlled (Experiment 3). The present results establish that online samples that include adults up to at least age 70 are easily recruited via MTurk and that the relations among age, speed, and working memory ability in such samples correspond to those typically observed in laboratory settings. These findings are important because using online samples to study aging provides a cost-effective way of collecting data from large samples of participants in a fraction of the time that it takes to conduct similar studies in the laboratory.
Frontiers in Psychology
CDC-recommended mitigation behaviors and vaccination status were assessed in an online sample (N ... more CDC-recommended mitigation behaviors and vaccination status were assessed in an online sample (N = 810; ages 18–80). Results were consistent with a differential distress hypothesis positing that whereas psychological distress, which is induced in part by social deprivation, interferes with mitigation behaviors involving social distancing, it motivates vaccination, in part because it, in turn, can increase social interaction. Age modulated these effects. Despite the greater risk of severe consequences, older adults not only showed less distress, but compared to younger participants with equivalent levels of distress, the older adults showed less effect of distress on both social distancing and vaccination status. Together these findings highlight a conundrum faced in public health messaging. Traditional “fear messages” may be less effective for older adults, who are most in danger, whereas in younger adults, the distress induced by fear messages may motivate vaccination but diminish ...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Psychological distress reached historically high levels in 2020, but why, and why were there pron... more Psychological distress reached historically high levels in 2020, but why, and why were there pronounced age differences? We address these questions using a relatively novel, multipronged approach, part narrative review and part new data analyses. We first updated previous analyses of national surveys that showed distress was increasing in the US and Australia through 2017 and then re-analyzed data from the UK, comparing periods with and without lockdowns. We also analyzed the effects of age and personality on distress in the US during the pandemic. Results showed distress levels and age differences in distress were still increasing through 2019 in the US, UK, and Australia. The effects of lockdowns in 2020 revealed the roles of social deprivation and fear of infection. Finally, age-related differences in emotional stability accounted for the observed age differences in distress. These findings reveal the limitations of analyses comparing pre-pandemic and pandemic periods without acc...
COVID
The occurrence of breakthrough infections with SARS-CoV-2 in vaccinated individuals argues agains... more The occurrence of breakthrough infections with SARS-CoV-2 in vaccinated individuals argues against abandoning mitigation efforts such as social distancing. Some public health messages, however, promote vaccination by increasing psychological distress, which interferes with social distancing. Prosocial messages present an alternative approach that may avoid this problem. Accordingly, the present study examined the relation of pandemic mitigation with scores on prosocial personality traits (i.e., altruism, sympathy, and trust) and vaccination intentions. Regression analyses indicated that while vaccination intentions increased significantly with an increase in trust, distancing increased significantly with increases in altruism and sympathy. Because older adults are much more vulnerable to COVID-19 than younger adults, these findings reveal an altruistic paradox, in which older adults, perhaps the most altruistic portion of the population, may be dependent on the altruistic behavior o...
JAMA otolaryngology-- head & neck surgery, 2017
Individuals with tinnitus have poorer working memory, slower processing speeds and reaction times... more Individuals with tinnitus have poorer working memory, slower processing speeds and reaction times, and deficiencies in selective attention, all of which interfere with readiness and performance. Brain Fitness Program-Tinnitus (BFP-T) is a cognitive training program specially designed to exploit neuroplasticity for preservation and expansion of cognitive health in adults with tinnitus. To evaluate the effect of the BFP-T on tinnitus. This open-label, intention-to-treat randomized clinical trial prescreened 191 patients with tinnitus and 64 healthy controls (HCs) from June 1, 2012, through October 31, 2013. Participants were 40 adults with bothersome tinnitus for more than 6 months and 20 age-matched HCs. Patients with tinnitus were randomized to a BFP-T or non-BFP-T control group. The BFP-T was completed online, and assessments were completed at Washington University School of Medicine. Participants in the intervention group were required to complete the BFP-T online 1 hour per day 5...
Psychology and Aging, 2016
In this study of visual (V-only) and audiovisual (AV) speech recognition in adults aged 22-92 yea... more In this study of visual (V-only) and audiovisual (AV) speech recognition in adults aged 22-92 years, the rate of age-related decrease in V-only performance was more than twice that in AV performance. Both auditory-only (A-only) and V-only performance were significant predictors of AV speech recognition, but age did not account for additional (unique) variance. Blurring the visual speech signal decreased speech recognition, and in AV conditions involving stimuli associated with equivalent unimodal performance for each participant, speech recognition remained constant from 22 to 92 years of age. Finally, principal components analysis revealed separate visual and auditory factors, but no evidence of an AV integration factor. Taken together, these results suggest that the benefit that comes from being able to see as well as hear a talker remains constant throughout adulthood and that changes in this AV advantage are entirely driven by age-related changes in unimodal visual and auditory speech recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13825589608256621, Sep 25, 2007
ABSTRACT
Psychonomic Bulletin Review, Oct 1, 2010
claimed that the diffusion model could simulate the molar patterns in response times (RTs) from t... more claimed that the diffusion model could simulate the molar patterns in response times (RTs) from the multiple tasks observed by . We present our own simulations to clarify the underlying mechanisms and show that, as is predicted by the difference engine model , correlations across tasks are the key to the molar patterns in individual RTs. Although the diffusion model and other sequential-sampling models may be able to accommodate patterns of RTs across tasks like those studied by Chen et al., the difference engine is the only current model that actually predicts them.
Psychology and Aging, 2016
The present study investigated whether older adults' visuospatial... more The present study investigated whether older adults' visuospatial working memory shows effects of environmental support for rehearsal similar to those observed in young adults (Lilienthal, Hale, & Myerson, 2014). When the duration of interitem intervals was 4 s and participants had sufficient time to rehearse, location memory spans were larger in both age groups when environmental support was present than when support was absent. Critically, however, the age-related difference in memory was actually larger when support was provided, suggesting that young and older adults may differ in their rehearsal of to-be-remembered locations. (PsycINFO Database Record
Our interest in working memory evolved out of our research on life span changes in cognitive proc... more Our interest in working memory evolved out of our research on life span changes in cognitive processing speed. Given the profound changes in response times (RTs) that are associated with cognitive development and aging (for a review, see Cerella & Hale, 1994), we wondered how age differences in speed might affect other aspects of cognitive function. With respect to working memory in particular, there seemed to be multiple ways in which it might be affected by changes in processing speed as well as multiple ways in which ...
Psychonomic Bulletin Review, Jun 1, 2007
Although there exists a large body of research on cognitive abilities (for a review, see , this r... more Although there exists a large body of research on cognitive abilities (for a review, see , this research has focused primarily on issues concerning the relative position of individual performances (e.g., whether those who score well on Test A also score well on Test B). There has been relatively little study, however, of what determines the absolute size of individual differences in performance. This may be partly because of problems inherent in comparing scores on different psychometric tests. These problems arise because different tests often measure performance on quantitatively (if not qualitatively) different scales. For example, how would one compare a difference in memory spans with a difference in vocabulary scores other than by using relative measures like z-scores or percentile ranks? In contrast, a major appeal of "chronometric" tests is that they can be used to measure very different abilities on the same fundamental scale-time. Taking advantage of this property of chronometric tests, Myerson, Hale, Zheng, Jenkins, and Widaman (2003) recently proposed a model of diversity in speeded cognition, which they termed the difference engine. This model describes the interaction between individual differences in processing speed on the one hand and the amount of processing required by different tasks on the other, and the effect of this interaction on the absolute size of individual differences in performance.
Ear and Hearing, May 1, 2019
Objective:The overall goal of this study was to compare verbal and visuo-spatial working memory i... more Objective:The overall goal of this study was to compare verbal and visuo-spatial working memory in children with normal hearing (NH) and with cochlear implants (CI). The main questions addressed by this study were: 1) Does auditory deprivation result in global or domain-specific deficits in working memory in children with CIs compared to their NH age-mates? 2) Does the potential for verbal recoding affect performance on measures of reasoning ability in children with CIs relative to their NH age-mates? 3) Is performance on verbal and visuo-spatial working memory tasks related to spoken receptive language level achieved by children with CIs?Design:A total of 54 children ranging in age from 5–9 years participated; 25 children with CIs and 29 children with NH. Participants were tested on both simple and complex measures of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory. Vocabulary was assessed with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and reasoning abilities with two subtests of the WISC-IV: Picture Concepts (verbally mediated) and Matrix Reasoning (visuo-spatial task). Groups were compared on all measures using analysis of variance (ANOVA) after controlling for age and maternal education.Results:Children with CIs scored significantly lower than children with NH on measures of working memory, after accounting for age and maternal education. Differences between the groups were more apparent for verbal working memory compared to visuo-spatial working memory. For reasoning and vocabulary, the CI group scored significantly lower than the NH group for PPVT and Picture Concepts, but similar to NH age mates on Matrix Reasoning.Conclusions:Results from this study suggest that children with CIs have deficits in working memory related to storing and processing verbal information in working memory. These deficits extend to receptive vocabulary and verbal reasoning and remain even after controlling for the higher maternal education level of the NH group. Their ability to store and process visuo-spatial information in WM and complete reasoning tasks that minimize verbal labeling of stimuli more closely approaches performance of NH age mates
Memory, Apr 18, 2018
People can rehearse to-be-remembered locations either overtly, using eye movements, or covertly, ... more People can rehearse to-be-remembered locations either overtly, using eye movements, or covertly, using only shifts of spatial attention. The present study examined whether the effectiveness of these two strategies depends on environmental support for rehearsal. In Experiment 1, when environmental support (i.e., the array of possible locations) was present and participants could engage in overt rehearsal during retention intervals, longer intervals resulted in larger spans, whereas in Experiment 2, when support was present but participants could only engage in covert rehearsal, longer intervals resulted in smaller spans. When environmental support was absent, however, longer retention intervals resulted in smaller memory spans regardless of which rehearsal strategies were available. In Experiment 3, analyses of participants' eye movements revealed that the presence of support increased participants' fixations of to-be-remembered target locations more than fixations of nontargets, and that this was associated with better memory performance. Further, although the total time fixating targets increased, individual target fixations were actually briefer. Taken together, the present findings suggest that in the presence of environmental support, overt rehearsal is more effective than covert rehearsal at maintaining to-be-remembered locations in working memory, and that having more time for overt rehearsal can actually increase visuospatial memory spans.
PLOS ONE, 2021
The present study examined individual characteristics potentially associated with changes in miti... more The present study examined individual characteristics potentially associated with changes in mitigation behaviors (social distancing and hygiene) recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Analysis of online survey responses from 361 adults, ages 20–78, with US IP addresses, identified significant correlates of adaptive behavioral changes, with implications for preventive strategies and mental health needs. The extent to which individuals changed their mitigation behaviors was unrelated to self-rated health or concern regarding the personal effects of COVID-19 but was related to concern regarding the effects of the pandemic on others. Thus, mitigation behaviors do not appear to be primarily motivated by self-protection. Importantly, adaptive changes in mitigation behaviors increased with age. However, these changes, particularly those related to the frequency of close proximity encounters, appear to be due to age-related decreases in anxiety and depression. Taken...
Experimental Aging Research, 2021
Background: This study addresses two issues: Whether age-related differences in working memory (W... more Background: This study addresses two issues: Whether age-related differences in working memory (WM) can be studied in online samples, and whether such differences reflect an inhibitory deficit. Currently, the evidence is mixed, but the playing field was not level because traditional statistics cannot provide evidence for the null hypothesis. Experiment 1: MTurk workers (ages 19-74) performed simple and complex visuospatial WM tasks to determine whether a secondary task affected the rate of age-related decline. Performance on both tasks replicated previous laboratory studies, establishing that age-related differences in WM can be studied online. Bayesian analyses revealed it is ten times as likely that there is no inhibitory deficit on visuospatial WM tasks as that there is. Experiment 2: The effects of irrelevant location information on visuospatial WM were examined in older (M age = 64.0) and younger (M age = 25.0) MTurk workers. Irrelevant locations produced interference, but both groups were equally affected. Bayesian analyses provided support for the null hypothesis of no age difference. Conclusions: The results of both experiments on working memory not only revealed equivalent visuospatial inhibitory function in older and younger adults, they also demonstrated that age-related differences in visuospatial WM can be effectively studied online as well as in the laboratory.
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2015
Whereas the energetic and informational masking effects of unintelligible babble on auditory spee... more Whereas the energetic and informational masking effects of unintelligible babble on auditory speech recognition are well established, the present study is the first to investigate its effects on visual speech recognition. Young and older adults performed two lipreading tasks while simultaneously experiencing either quiet, speech-shaped noise, or 6-talker background babble. Both words at the end of uninformative carrier sentences and key words in everyday sentences were harder to lipread in the presence of babble than in the presence of speech-shaped noise or quiet. Contrary to the inhibitory deficit hypothesis of cognitive aging, babble had equivalent effects on young and older adults. In a follow-up experiment, neither the babble nor the speech-shaped noise stimuli interfered with performance of a face-processing task, indicating that babble selectively interferes with visual speech recognition and not with visual perception tasks per se. The present results demonstrate that babble can produce cross-modal informational masking and suggest a breakdown in audiovisual scene analysis, either because of obligatory monitoring of even uninformative speech sounds or because of obligatory efforts to integrate speech sounds even with uncorrelated mouth movements.
The Psychological Record, 2015
Three experiments assessed the use of online samples recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (M... more Three experiments assessed the use of online samples recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) worker pool for studying the psychology of aging. The results replicated several. benchmark findings: Older adults’ response times (RTs) improved more with practice, but their asymptotic RTs remained longer than those of the younger adults (Experiment 1); greater age-related declines were observed in visuospatial processing speed than in verbal speed (Experiment 2); and although working memory decreased with age, age was not a significant predictor of working memory once processing speed was statistically controlled (Experiment 3). The present results establish that online samples that include adults up to at least age 70 are easily recruited via MTurk and that the relations among age, speed, and working memory ability in such samples correspond to those typically observed in laboratory settings. These findings are important because using online samples to study aging provides a cost-effective way of collecting data from large samples of participants in a fraction of the time that it takes to conduct similar studies in the laboratory.
Frontiers in Psychology
CDC-recommended mitigation behaviors and vaccination status were assessed in an online sample (N ... more CDC-recommended mitigation behaviors and vaccination status were assessed in an online sample (N = 810; ages 18–80). Results were consistent with a differential distress hypothesis positing that whereas psychological distress, which is induced in part by social deprivation, interferes with mitigation behaviors involving social distancing, it motivates vaccination, in part because it, in turn, can increase social interaction. Age modulated these effects. Despite the greater risk of severe consequences, older adults not only showed less distress, but compared to younger participants with equivalent levels of distress, the older adults showed less effect of distress on both social distancing and vaccination status. Together these findings highlight a conundrum faced in public health messaging. Traditional “fear messages” may be less effective for older adults, who are most in danger, whereas in younger adults, the distress induced by fear messages may motivate vaccination but diminish ...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Psychological distress reached historically high levels in 2020, but why, and why were there pron... more Psychological distress reached historically high levels in 2020, but why, and why were there pronounced age differences? We address these questions using a relatively novel, multipronged approach, part narrative review and part new data analyses. We first updated previous analyses of national surveys that showed distress was increasing in the US and Australia through 2017 and then re-analyzed data from the UK, comparing periods with and without lockdowns. We also analyzed the effects of age and personality on distress in the US during the pandemic. Results showed distress levels and age differences in distress were still increasing through 2019 in the US, UK, and Australia. The effects of lockdowns in 2020 revealed the roles of social deprivation and fear of infection. Finally, age-related differences in emotional stability accounted for the observed age differences in distress. These findings reveal the limitations of analyses comparing pre-pandemic and pandemic periods without acc...
COVID
The occurrence of breakthrough infections with SARS-CoV-2 in vaccinated individuals argues agains... more The occurrence of breakthrough infections with SARS-CoV-2 in vaccinated individuals argues against abandoning mitigation efforts such as social distancing. Some public health messages, however, promote vaccination by increasing psychological distress, which interferes with social distancing. Prosocial messages present an alternative approach that may avoid this problem. Accordingly, the present study examined the relation of pandemic mitigation with scores on prosocial personality traits (i.e., altruism, sympathy, and trust) and vaccination intentions. Regression analyses indicated that while vaccination intentions increased significantly with an increase in trust, distancing increased significantly with increases in altruism and sympathy. Because older adults are much more vulnerable to COVID-19 than younger adults, these findings reveal an altruistic paradox, in which older adults, perhaps the most altruistic portion of the population, may be dependent on the altruistic behavior o...
JAMA otolaryngology-- head & neck surgery, 2017
Individuals with tinnitus have poorer working memory, slower processing speeds and reaction times... more Individuals with tinnitus have poorer working memory, slower processing speeds and reaction times, and deficiencies in selective attention, all of which interfere with readiness and performance. Brain Fitness Program-Tinnitus (BFP-T) is a cognitive training program specially designed to exploit neuroplasticity for preservation and expansion of cognitive health in adults with tinnitus. To evaluate the effect of the BFP-T on tinnitus. This open-label, intention-to-treat randomized clinical trial prescreened 191 patients with tinnitus and 64 healthy controls (HCs) from June 1, 2012, through October 31, 2013. Participants were 40 adults with bothersome tinnitus for more than 6 months and 20 age-matched HCs. Patients with tinnitus were randomized to a BFP-T or non-BFP-T control group. The BFP-T was completed online, and assessments were completed at Washington University School of Medicine. Participants in the intervention group were required to complete the BFP-T online 1 hour per day 5...
Psychology and Aging, 2016
In this study of visual (V-only) and audiovisual (AV) speech recognition in adults aged 22-92 yea... more In this study of visual (V-only) and audiovisual (AV) speech recognition in adults aged 22-92 years, the rate of age-related decrease in V-only performance was more than twice that in AV performance. Both auditory-only (A-only) and V-only performance were significant predictors of AV speech recognition, but age did not account for additional (unique) variance. Blurring the visual speech signal decreased speech recognition, and in AV conditions involving stimuli associated with equivalent unimodal performance for each participant, speech recognition remained constant from 22 to 92 years of age. Finally, principal components analysis revealed separate visual and auditory factors, but no evidence of an AV integration factor. Taken together, these results suggest that the benefit that comes from being able to see as well as hear a talker remains constant throughout adulthood and that changes in this AV advantage are entirely driven by age-related changes in unimodal visual and auditory speech recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13825589608256621, Sep 25, 2007
ABSTRACT
Psychonomic Bulletin Review, Oct 1, 2010
claimed that the diffusion model could simulate the molar patterns in response times (RTs) from t... more claimed that the diffusion model could simulate the molar patterns in response times (RTs) from the multiple tasks observed by . We present our own simulations to clarify the underlying mechanisms and show that, as is predicted by the difference engine model , correlations across tasks are the key to the molar patterns in individual RTs. Although the diffusion model and other sequential-sampling models may be able to accommodate patterns of RTs across tasks like those studied by Chen et al., the difference engine is the only current model that actually predicts them.
Psychology and Aging, 2016
The present study investigated whether older adults' visuospatial... more The present study investigated whether older adults' visuospatial working memory shows effects of environmental support for rehearsal similar to those observed in young adults (Lilienthal, Hale, & Myerson, 2014). When the duration of interitem intervals was 4 s and participants had sufficient time to rehearse, location memory spans were larger in both age groups when environmental support was present than when support was absent. Critically, however, the age-related difference in memory was actually larger when support was provided, suggesting that young and older adults may differ in their rehearsal of to-be-remembered locations. (PsycINFO Database Record
Our interest in working memory evolved out of our research on life span changes in cognitive proc... more Our interest in working memory evolved out of our research on life span changes in cognitive processing speed. Given the profound changes in response times (RTs) that are associated with cognitive development and aging (for a review, see Cerella & Hale, 1994), we wondered how age differences in speed might affect other aspects of cognitive function. With respect to working memory in particular, there seemed to be multiple ways in which it might be affected by changes in processing speed as well as multiple ways in which ...
Psychonomic Bulletin Review, Jun 1, 2007
Although there exists a large body of research on cognitive abilities (for a review, see , this r... more Although there exists a large body of research on cognitive abilities (for a review, see , this research has focused primarily on issues concerning the relative position of individual performances (e.g., whether those who score well on Test A also score well on Test B). There has been relatively little study, however, of what determines the absolute size of individual differences in performance. This may be partly because of problems inherent in comparing scores on different psychometric tests. These problems arise because different tests often measure performance on quantitatively (if not qualitatively) different scales. For example, how would one compare a difference in memory spans with a difference in vocabulary scores other than by using relative measures like z-scores or percentile ranks? In contrast, a major appeal of "chronometric" tests is that they can be used to measure very different abilities on the same fundamental scale-time. Taking advantage of this property of chronometric tests, Myerson, Hale, Zheng, Jenkins, and Widaman (2003) recently proposed a model of diversity in speeded cognition, which they termed the difference engine. This model describes the interaction between individual differences in processing speed on the one hand and the amount of processing required by different tasks on the other, and the effect of this interaction on the absolute size of individual differences in performance.