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The Effect Of Familiarity Of Task And Choice On The Functional Performance Of Young And Old Adults, Anne E. Dickerson

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An experiment was conducted to compare the functional performance of young and old adults on familiar and unfamiliar tasks under two conditions of perceived control. Specifically, the relation between age and motor and process skills was examined. The familiar tasks were simple cooking tasks, whereas the unfamiliar tasks were contrived, meaningless tasks developed for this study. Young and old did not differ in the ratings of the familiarity of the tasks, but results from two Age by Task by Choice ANOVAs demonstrated a significant age difference for motor and process skills under all conditions. For the process skill scale, there …