Categorization in Context for Older & Young Adults

This investigation explored effects of linguistic context on category structure in young and typical older adults. In a timed computer-based contextual categorization task, participants were provided with 150 stimulus sentences containing a superordinate category label. Participants were required to make a semantic decision relative to determining if a specific exemplar was the best example of the target category concept in the sentence using context. Response accuracy and reaction time results revealed that use of linguistic context for categorization was vulnerable to the aging process, as older adults were slower and less accurate for all response types except out-of-set examplars