Citation

Dollinger SMC, Hoyer WJ. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 1996; 10(3): 225-239.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1996, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/(SICI)1099-0720(199606)10:3<225::AID-ACP376>3.0.CO;2-X

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the effects of age and domain-specific experience on the speed and accuracy of visual inspection performance. In Experiment 1, young (M age = 26.5 years) and middle-aged (M age = 45.7 years) medical laboratory technologists (MTs) and matched novices were tested on a domain-specific version and on a domain-general version of a probe recognition task. Middle-aged subjects were slower than younger subjects on both versions, and MTs were more accurate but slower than controls on the domain-specific task. In Experiment 2, MTs and controls were tested on the same tasks under single-task and dual-task conditions. Middle-aged adults were slower and less accurate than young adults under dual-task conditions in the general version. For the domain-specific version, the response times and error data suggested that skilled performance is less demanding of age-limited general-purpose processing resources.

Language: en