Date of Award

2008

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Poreh, Amir

Subject Headings

Cognition in old age, Cognition, Cognitive neuroscience, Brain -- Aging, Neuropsychological testing, Executive functions, Strategy, Aging

Abstract

Although various dementia-related executive deficits have been identified, the functional state of the frontal lobe during healthy aging remains unclear (Raz et al., 2005). The proposed study examines the use of strategy in measures of executive functioning in younger and older adults. Specifically, the strategy types of a nonverbal fluency task are shown to differentially correlate with the actual output generated by participants. The strategies employed here are compared between the two age groups, illustrating that older adults use the best strategy significantly less than younger adults, even when controlling for output differences, which may support the frontal lobe hypothesis of aging. The strategy types were shown to have no linear relationship with education level. Therefore, the possibility of using strategy type in this nonverbal fluency measure as a nonverbal premorbid indicator is not likely

Download

Included in

Psychology Commons

COinS