Critical thinking during the adult years: has the developmental function changed over the last four decades?

Age, sex, and education differences in critical thinking during the adult years were investigated. The Watson-Glaser (1980) Critical Thinking Appraisal was administered to 60 men and women between the ages of 20 and 79. Regression analyses indicated that age was significantly related to overall critical thinking: Performance decreased with increasing age. Education was also significantly related to critical thinking: Performance increased with increasing education. However, an interaction between age and education in the analysis of total critical thinking scores indicated that education was significantly related to critical thinking only in the later adult years. No sex differences were found in critical thinking performance.

Aging and episodic memory: are elderly adults less likely to make connections between target and contextual information?

The hypothesis that elderly individuals are less likely than young adults to connect target and contextual information was tested. Young and elderly adults were presented with a number of slides, each of which contained a word superimposed in the center of a background picture of a landscape or cityscape. Half of the subjects were told to remember the words and half were told to remember the word-and-background pairs. All subjects were then tested for their recognition memory of the word-and-background pairs. The results indicate that elderly adults have greater difficulty than young adults remembering the connections between words and background pictures but that this occurs whether the pictures are target information or contextual information. Therefore, the results of this study provide no support for the notion that elderly adults have a specific contextual encoding deficit.

Does social problem solving differ from other types of problem solving during the adult years?

One hundred thirteen individuals, ages 18-81, were presented with a test of social problem solving, a test of practical problem solving, the Twenty Questions task (a test of traditional problem solving), the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale--Revised Vocabulary subtest (a measure of crystallized intelligence), and Raven's Progressive Matrices (a measure of fluid intelligence). The effects of age, sex, education, and intellectual abilities on problem-solving performance were examined. Social problem solving was positively related to higher education and higher Vocabulary scores, but it was not related to age. Social problem solving and practical problem solving were significantly related to each other and to scores on the Vocabulary subtest, whereas traditional problem solving was significantly related to scores on Raven's Progressive Matrices. These results suggest that different types of problem solving are differentially related to other intellectual abilities and to age.

The effect of instructions on age differences in practical problem solving.

In previous research middle-aged adults have typically been found to perform better on practical, everyday problems than either younger or older adults. However, it has been suggested that young adults may not expend as much effort as middle-aged adults and therefore may not perform as well as they are capable of performing. In order to test this hypothesis, the performance of young, middle-aged, and elderly adults was compared on 10 practical, everyday problems. Half of the subjects were given standard instructions and half were given instructions that encouraged them to perform as well as they possibly could. With the standard instructions, the young adults performed less well than either the middle-aged or the elderly adults. With the more explicit instructions, however, the young adults performed as well as the middle-aged adults and better than the elderly adults. The results of this study indicate that there may be a tendency on the part of young adults to give less than their optimal performance unless explicitly instructed to do their best.

An adult developmental study of the encoding of spatial location.

The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that there is a differential deficit in the ability to encode contextual information with increasing age. Young, middle-aged, and elderly adults were shown target words in various quadrants of a computer screen (contexts) and were told to either (a) remember the words and their locations, (b) remember the words, or (c) tell whether the words referred to something that was alive or not. Following presentation of the words, subjects were given a recognition test for the words and were asked to identify the quadrant in which each word had been presented. If older adults have a contextual encoding deficit, than an interaction between age and instruction condition would be expected in memory for quadrants. Older adults would be expected to perform better relative to younger adults when the locations were target information (intentionally learned) than when they were contextual (not intentionally learned). Since such an interaction was not obtained, the results provide no support for the hypothesis that the elderly have an encoding deficit that is specific to contextual information.

An adult development study of contextual memory.

This study tested the hypothesis that there is a relatively greater decrease in memory for contextual features than in memory for target information with increasing age. Young, middle-aged, and elderly adults were presented with a number of slides, each of which contained a word centered on a background composed of either a landscape/cityscape or a border design. One third of the subjects were told to remember the words, one third were told to remember the backgrounds, and one third were told to remember the word-and-background pairs. Recognition memory for both words, backgrounds, and word-and-background pairings was tested in all subjects. The interaction between age, instruction condition, and type of information tested was not significant. Thus, there was no support for the hypothesis that older adults have a greater deficit in contextual memory than in memory for target information when compared to younger adults.

Training effects on Raven's progressive matrices in young, middle-aged, and elderly adults.

Previous training studies of fluid intellectual abilities have involved training on either figural relations or induction tasks. In the present study, young, middle-aged, and elderly adults were given training on another measure of fluid ability--Raven's Progressive Matrices. The training involved a strategy-modeling technique that lasted no more than a few minutes. The results indicated that (a) performance on the Raven decreased with increasing age, (b) training significantly improved performance, and (c) the effect of training did not differ as a function of the age or sex of the subjects. Thus, the results indicate that performance on the Raven can be significantly improved in a single, brief training session.

A developmental study of practical problem solving in adults.

Previous research indicates that young and middle-aged adults perform better than other age groups on problems similar to those they might encounter in their everyday lives. However, elderly adults have not performed better than other age groups on problems designed to give them the advantage. In order to ensure that the problems used in the present study were ones that elderly adults might encounter, elderly adults were recruited to help develop the problems. The resulting problems were administered to adults between the ages of 20 and 80. Performance was found to increase from the 20- to 40-year-old age group and decrease thereafter. Thus, when elderly adults devise practical problems that are intended to give elderly adults the advantage, the elderly adults still perform less well than do middle-aged adults.

A reanalysis of the influence of a "friendly visitor" program.

A paper in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP), by Reinke, Holmes, and myself, reported the results of a study of the influence of a friendly visitor program on the cognitive functioning and morale of elderly individuals. The program was reported to have had a significant multivariate effect on a combination of cognitive and morale measures and significant univariate effects on memory, self-perceived health, and activity director's ratings. Being intrigued by the memory finding, I conducted a follow-up study to further investigate the effect of a visitation program on cognitive functioning. In this second study the dependent measures included all of the cognitive variables included in the original study as well as some additional memory variables. The visitation program in the follow-up study had no effect on any of these measures. As a result of my failure to obtain a significant memory effect such as that reported in Reinke et al. (1981), I reanalyzed the data from the original study. In my reanalysis, the only significant effect was a borderline univariate effect for self-perceived health; the multivariate effect did not approach significance. On the basis of my inability to produce the results reported in Reinke et al. when I reanalyzed the original data, I must conclude that the friendly visitor program did not have the effects attributed to it in the original report.

Postpartum moods in men and women.

Twenty-one married couples, recruited from childbirth classes (mean age 29.6 years), were administered questionnaires measuring 20 different moods during the third trimester of pregnancy (prepartum period), during the postpartum period, and at 6 months after birth (follow-up period). In each questionnaire period individual questionnaires were filled out daily by both the mother and father for 10 consecutive days. The results indicated that the postpartum period, compared with the prepartum and follow-up periods, is an emotionally unique time but not a period marked by depression. The moods that were rated as being experienced more strongly by men and women during the postpartum period were associated with anxiety and concern for one's ability to cope such as "nervousness," "worried," "helpless," and "anxious" or positive emotions such as "enthusiastic" and "happy." It is concluded that men and women in this sample tend to experience the postpartum period in an emotionally similar way.

A review of life span research with the Twenty Questions Task: a study of problem-solving ability.

Research with the Twenty Questions Task which was aimed at investigating problem solving across the life span was reviewed. This research indicates that the use of an efficient problem-solving strategy increases during childhood and then decreases again during the later adult years. Investigations of the determinants of performance on the Twenty Questions Task indicate that both age and education are significantly related to performance. Training research further indicates that both young children and elderly adults are able to learn to use a more efficient strategy; modeling appears to be a very effective training technique. Attempts to facilitate the performance of elderly adults by means other than direct training have met with less success. No improvement in performance was obtained either in a study in which an attempt was made to increase elderly adults' motivation, in a study in which elderly adults were given additional practice with the Twenty Questions Task, or in a study in which an attempt was made to facilitate elderly adults' confidence in their ability to perform cognitive tasks. However, performance was facilitated when the demands of the task were made either so easy that the possibility of the use of an efficient strategy was obvious or so difficult that the necessity of using an efficient strategy in order to solve the problem was obvious. The results of all of the studies were discussed as fitting a model of life span cognitive development recently proposed by Denney.

A lifespan study of classification preference.

Individuals between the ages of 4 and 70 were presented with a revised version of the Conceptual Styles Test. The number of similarity classifications was found to increase from the 4- to the 45- to 50-year-old group and to decrease thereafter; the number of complementary responses was found to decrease and then increase. The 20- to 25-year-old group used more perceptual similarity classifications, whereas the 35- to 40- and 45- to 50-year-old groups used more functional similarity classifications. One purpose of the study was to determine whether, as Kogan has suggested, elderly adults are more creative and free-wheeling in their classification responses than younger individuals. Two measures of creativity were employed; one was based on the experimenter's judgements and one based on the frequency with which the same response was given by other subjects. Neither measure indicated that the elderly individuals were more creative than the other age groups.

Sex differences in sexual needs and desires.

Female and male responses on attitudes toward foreplay prior to sexual intercourse, sexual intercourse, and afterplay following sexual intercourse, were compared. Foreplay was defined as the sexual activity that occurs before sexual intercourse, whereas afterplay was defined as the interaction such as hugging, holding, talking, and so forth that occurs after sexual intercourse. The subjects were 39 men and 49 women students enrolled in various courses at the University of Kansas. The mean age of the men was 22.1 years, while the women averaged 21.0 years. A voluntary questionnaire was given to the students, and they were asked to fill it out at home and return it during the next class meeting. The results indicated that there were significant sex differences in sexual needs and desires. When given a choice between foreplay, intercourse, and afterplay, women indicated that foreplay was the most important part of a sexual encounter, while men felt intercourse was the most important aspect. Women also indicated that they wanted to spend more time in foreplay, as well as more time in afterplay, than did men. It is concluded from this study that women are more likely than men to report enjoying both foreplay and afterplay more than intercourse, while men are more likely to report enjoying intercourse.

Elderly adults' perception of their own cognitive development during the adult years.

Individuals between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-five were asked a number of questions regarding which of their cognitive abilities they think have changed with age and, further, what factors they think are responsible for such age changes. Questions were asked in two areas of cognitive functioning--memory and problem solving. With respect to memory, the reports of the elderly adults corresponded well with the results of memory research, which indicates that most memory abilities tend to decrease with increasing age. The elderly adults suggested that activity level, amount of contact with the information to be remembered, practice remembering, the perceived importance of the information to be remembered, and expectations regarding changes in memory are all factors that may contribute to age changes in memory. With respect to problem solving, on the other hand, the reports of the elderly did not correspond with the research. Research indicates that such abilities probably decline with increasing age while the elderly reported that they think that their problem-solving abilities have actually increased with age. Factors that were mentioned as possible causes of the reported increases in problem-solving ability were experience, good health, and taking more time to solve a problem.

The relationship between classification and questioning strategies among adults.

Adults ranging from 30 to 90 were administered the Twenty Questions Task to evaluate questioning strategies and the Picture Pairing Test to assess classification preferences. With respect to the Twenty Questions Task, the results indicated that the percentage of constraint-seeking questions decreased while the percentage of hypothesis-testing questions increased across age. With respect to classification, the results indicated that the use of similarity-based classifications decreased while the use of complementary-based classification increased across age. Further, there was significant relationship between questioning strategy and classification preference. Individuals who asked constraint-seeking questions tended to use similarity-based classifications and those who asked hypothesis-testing questions tended to use complementary-based classifications.

A developmental study of adults' performance on traditional and practical problem-solving tasks.

Ninety-six individuals between the ages of 20 and 80 were presented with two types of problem-solving tasks. One was a traditional laboratory problem-solving task; the other was composed of a number of practical problems. Three types of practical problems were employed--problems that young adults might encounter in their daily lives, problems that middle-aged adults might encounter, and problems that elderly adults might encounter. On the traditional laboratory task, performance decreased with increasing age. On the practical problems, however, performance increased from the 20- to the 30-year-old group and decreased thereafter with the most drastic decreases occurring in the 60- and 70-year-old groups. When the three types of practical problems were analyzed separately, the performance of the younger adults was better than the performance of older adults on all of the problem-solving tasks, even on the practical problems that were designed specifically to be ones that older adults would be more likely to encounter in their daily lives.

Influence of a "friendly visitor" program on the cognitive functioning and morale of elderly persons.

Forty-nine nursing home residents were randomly assigned to a visitation condition focusing on conversational interaction, a visitation condition in which the playing of cognitively challenging games supplemented conversation, or a no-treatment control condition. Each subject in a visitation condition was visited by an undergraduate student twice per week for 8 weeks. Before and after the visitation period, all subjects were given four tests of cognitive functioning (vocabulary, matrices, memory, problem-solving), three tests of morale (Life Satisfaction Index A; Philadelphia Geriatric Center Morale Scale, self-perceived health), and were rated by nursing home activity directors on morale, program participation, alertness, sociability, and physical condition. A multivariate analysis of covariance, in which age, education, and length of nursing home residency were covariates, revealed a reliable overall effect for the treatment (p = .001). Subjects in both visitation conditions generally demonstrated improved performance relative to control subjects, and subjects in the conversation-plus-games condition demonstrated the greatest improvement. The univariate effects for memory, self-perceived health, and ratings of sociability were reliable.

Adult age differences on traditional and practical problem-solving measures.

Eighty-four adults between the ages of 20 and 79 were presented with two types of problem-solving tasks. One was a task that is typically used in problem-solving research and the other was a task composed of practical problems that adults might encounter in their daily lives. Performance on the two types of tasks exhibited different developmental functions across age. Performance on the traditional problem-solving task decreased linearly across the page while performance on the practical problems increased to a peak in the 40- and 50-year-old groups and decreased thereafter. The results indicate that the developmental function obtained for problem-solving during the adult years depends on the type of problems that are presented. While performance on the abstract type of problems typically employed in research may decrease with age during the adult years, performance on practical problems may exhibit a different relationship with age.

Attempts to modify cognitive tempo in elderly adults.

Three experiments were conducted in an attempt to modify the cognitive tempo of elderly adults. In all three, attempts were made to modify response latency. In the first experiment, the participants were given either instructions to take as much time as they needed, instructions to respond as quickly as they could, or no instructions regarding response speed. In the second experiment, the participants observed a model who either responded more slowly, more quickly, or at the same speed typically used by elderly adults. In the third experiment, the participants were either forced to respond very slowly, forced to respond very quickly, or allowed to respond at their own rate. Only one of the experimental manipulations affected response latencies. The participants who were forced to respond very quickly in the third experiment exhibited a decrease in response latency from pretest to posttest while the participants in the other two conditions did not. There was a corresponding effect for errors; the participants in the fast condition exhibited very little change in error rate from pretest to posttest while the participants in the other two conditions made fewer errors on the posttest than on the pretest. In the third experiment, an attempt was also made to modify the error rate by training the participants in the use of a thorough and systematic scanning strategy. The strategy training had no effect on either errors or latencies.

Task demands and problem-solving strategies in middle-aged and older adults.

Elderly individuals tend to use less efficient strategies on problem-solving tasks such as the Twenty Questions task than younger adults. Two studies were undertaken in an attempt to facilitate the problem-solving performance of elderly individuals by manipulating the demands of the problem-solving tasks. In the first study, problems that were so difficult as to be virtually insoluble without the use of an efficient strategy were compared with standard Twenty Questions problems. While middle-aged individuals tended to use an efficient strategy on both the difficult and the standard problems, elderly individuals tended to use an efficient strategy much more frequently on the difficult problems than on the standard problems. In the second study, problems with stimuli that were more easily classifiable than the standard stimuli were compared with standard Twenty Questions problems. Middle-aged individuals again tended to use an efficient strategy on both types of problems while elderly individuals tended to use an efficient strategy much more frequently on the problems with the easily classifiable stimuli. The fact that elderly individuals can use more efficient strategies under certain circumstances when they have not been given training in the use of such strategies suggests that the elderly have such strategies in their repertoires. It is not clear why they are less likely than younger adults to use efficient strategies in at least some problem-solving situations.