Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Acquisition And Application Of Expertise At Computer Text Editing By Younger And Older Adults, Alan Hartley, Joellen T. Hartley

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Groups of younger and older adults learned to use a computer text editor. Measures of both knowledge and performance were collected at regular intervals. Better recall of material learned was correlated with better performance; there were no age group differences in recalled knowledge or in performance. Models of more skilled individuals showed richer knowledge representations and more sophisticated performance rules than models of less skilled individuals. Age accounted for very little of the variation in skilled performance.