Comparison of Explicit Sequence Motor Learning in Youth and Elderly

پژوهش های روان شناسی بالینی و مشاوره

Article 7, Volume 09, Issue 2, November 2008

Document Type: پژوهشی

DOI: 10.22067/ijap.v9i2.6833

Authors

VAHID Nejati^* ; HASAN ASHAYERI; mirtaghi Garusi; mohammad taghi Aghdasi

Abstract

Motor sequence is bases of much of human intelligent behavior. It is because of such sequential skills involved chaining a number of primitive actions together. Cognitive aging is the part of aging that cause decrease cognitive ability of elderly such as learning. The purpose of this research is comparison of explicit learning in youth and elderly. Soft ware of serial reaction time task is used for sequence learning. This software registers errors and Response Time (RT) in response to sequential stimulus. We compare youth (N=15) and elderly (N=15) in two groups. The task defines in 10 blocks that the first and the sixth blocks where random and the other blocks were sequential. ANOVA for compare response times and errors in different blocks and paired T Test for compare regular and irregular blocks and independent T Test for compare youth and elderly is used. Result show that in youth and elderly RT decreases in regular and irregular blocks. Errors in youth is lower than elderly. RT decreasing in elderly is lower than youth. As frontal lobe is affected in explicit learning and in aging process frontal lobe is more deteriorate than other brain part. The explicit learning in elderly is less than youth.
Key words: Explicit Learning, Sequence Learning, Age