One area that remained off the research radar is that interface between senior centers and learning programs, and hence, their potential to act as community-based learning hubs. Countering such a state of affairs, this article reports on an action research study to investigate the extent that a transformative learning program in a senior center…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine divided attention over a large age range by looking at the effects of 3 nonspeech tasks on concurrent speech motor performance. The nonspeech tasks were designed to facilitate measurement of bidirectional interference, allowing examination of their sensitivity to speech activity. A cross-sectional…

Purpose: The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of age on listening effort. Method: A dual-task paradigm was used to evaluate listening effort in different conditions of background noise. Sixty adults ranging in age from 20 to 77 years were included. A primary speech-recognition task and a secondary memory task were performed…

Purpose: A new literature has suggested that speech rate can influence the parsing of words quite strongly in speech. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences between younger adults and older adults in the use of context speech rate in word segmentation, given that older adults perceive timing information differently from younger…

Typical aging is associated with diminished episodic memory performance. To improve our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying this age-related memory deficit, we previously developed an integrated, cross-species approach to link converging evidence from human and animal research. This novel approach focuses on the ability to…

Background: Social perception is an important skill. One assessment that is commonly used to assess social perception abilities is The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT). The only normative data available for this test are for Australian younger adults. Despite no normative data being available for British adults, the test is widely used…

Oregon's Tier One Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) covered members prior to January 1, 1996. This "Issue Brief" documents the generosity of the money match provision under Oregon's Tier One plan relative to the Tier One defined-benefit formula, and relative to other plans in Oregon and Washington and to representative plans…

How do different forms of education contribute to value preferences? Clearly, informal education through personal experiences that shape one's sense of identity and frame cultural expectations and opportunities (as indexed by culture, gender and age-cohort), non-formal education through religious traditions and formal state-mandated education all…

The primary purposes of the present study were to examine age differences in adaptive decision making and to evaluate the role of numeracy in mediating the relationship between age and adaptive decision making. Adaptive decision making was assessed by the Cups task (Levin, Weller, Pederson, & Harshman, 2007). Forty-six younger (18 to 24 years…

Reductions in stimulus quality may disrupt the reading performance of older adults more when compared with young adults because of sensory declines that begin early in middle age. However, few studies have investigated adult age differences in the effects of stimulus quality on reading, and none have examined how this affects lexical processing…

Social approach and social avoidance goals (i.e., approach of positive and avoidance of negative outcomes in social situations) are important predictors of the feeling of being socially integrated or isolated. However, little is known about the development of these goals across adulthood. In a large diary study with N = 744 young (18-39 years),…

The main goal of this study was to examine whether different types of verbal labeling can influence age-related changes in the dynamic control of behavior by inducing either a proactive or reactive mode of control. Proactive control is characterized by a strong engagement in maintaining task-relevant information to be optimally prepared while…

With the projected growth of the older adult population, an anticipated increase can be expected in the number of third-age learners (60-80 years-of-age) returning to college due to life transitions, pursuit of encore careers, or for the purposes of generativity, and self-actualization. In a society that values youth, and whose institutions…

We investigated the effects of age on proactive and reactive cognitive control in a large population sample of 809 individuals, ranging in age between 5 and 97 years. For that purpose, we used an anticue paradigm, which required a consistent remapping of cue location and response hand: Left-sided cues required right-hand responses and vice versa.…

Sounds deviating from an otherwise repeated or structured sequence capture attention and affect performance in an ongoing visual task negatively, testament to the balance between selective attention and change detection. Although deviance distraction has been the object of much research, its modulation across the life span has been more scarcely…