Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Relationships In Aging, Cognitive Processes, And Contingency Learning, Sarah Reeder

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study investigated the influence of age, processing speed, working memory,and associative processes on the acquisition of contingency information. Young and older adults completed positive (+.65) and negative (-.65) contingency tasks that measured their ability to discover the relationship between a symptom (e.g., FEVER) and a fictional disease (e.g., OLYALGIA). Both d' scores, i.e., contingency learning, and contingency estimates, i.e., contingency judgment, were examined. Participants were also asked to complete cognitive tasks that measure the constructs of processing speed, working memory resources, associative memory, and associative learning. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the direct and indirect relationships between …