Age effects on response monitoring in a mental-rotation task.

A mental-rotation task was presented to 17 young (aged 18-28 yrs) and 13 old (aged 60-76 yrs) adults to simultaneously assess age-related changes in performance, response monitoring and adaptive behavior. Relative to young participants, older adults were less inclined to adjust their speed at the expense of accuracy. They displayed a larger number of slow errors, smaller error potentials, more immediate corrections of errors when detected, and a larger speed reduction on trials following an error. The data suggest that for older adults an increase of task complexity sometimes caused a radical failure in determining the correct response, rather than a gradual reduction of efficiency.