Aging and Capacity in the Same-Different Judgment

The same-different judgment was used in two experiments to investigate age-group differences in visual processing. Two targets next to fixation were presented; on half the trials the targets were the same, and on half the trials the targets differed by color, shape, or color and shape (redundant). Response times were lower for redundant trials than for color-only and shape-only trials; this redundancy gain was greater for older observers than for young observers. Capacity measures based on the integrated hazard functions indicated that young adults, but not older adults, experienced a slowing of processing (reduction of capacity) in the redundant condition. These capacity measures may provide a method for interpreting age-group effects in the presence of overall response-time differences. At present, there is no grand unifying theory to explain age-related differences in cognition (Salthouse & Craik, 2000; Salthouse, 2004). Two global descriptions of age-group effects, each of which has a lot of explanatory power, are reductions in speed (generalized slowing; Cerella, 1990; Salthouse, 1992) and reductions in capacit