Biomedical subjects

M M Jacewicz

Publications and source records attributed to M M Jacewicz.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1987

Age differences in the speed of cognitive operations: resolution of inconsistent findings.

Gaylord and Marsh (1975) and Cerella et al. (1981) found that the speed of cognitive operations in the mental rotation paradigm was significantly slower for groups of older adults with mean ages of 68 and 73 years than for groups of younger adults. Jacewicz and Hartley (1979) found no difference between a group of adults with a mean age of 56 and a group of younger adults. The present study included a group of younger adults, a late-middle age group with a mean age of 56, as well as an older group with a mean age of 74. The results replicated both those reported by Jacewicz and Hartley (1979) and those reported by Gaylord and Marsh (1975) and Cerella et al. (1981). They are consistent with a hypothesis of generalized central nervous system slowing, but they show that the slowing does not begin to affect performance until the sixth decade of life.

Adult↗

PubMed1979

Rotation of mental images by young and old college students: the effects of familiarity.

Younger and older college students judged whether letters, rotated from 0 to 180 degrees away from normal, upright position, were standard letters or mirror-images of standard letters. The analysis separated basic speed of response from the rate at which mental manipulations of the images of the letters took place. With letters from the English alphabet, younger (mean age, 21.6 years) and older (mean age 55.9 years) sugjects did not differ either in basic speed or in rate of manipulation. With unfamiliar, lower-case Greek letters, however, the basic speed of older subjects (mean age, 56.5 years) was slower than that of younger subjects (mean age, 21.2 years) while there was no difference in rate of manipulation. The results are inconsistent with an hypothesis of general slowing of central nervous system activity.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1979

Word context effects on letter recognition.

24 subjects were asked to determine whether a target letter was present in a tachistoscopically exposed word. The presence of the target was detected faster if the target was clarly sounded in the word, that is, the target G in the word TIGER was detected faster than the target G in the word RIGHT. This effect was strongest among subjects whose over-all response time was below the median value. This result was interpreted as evidence that (1) a word is recognized as a whole before its component parts are analyzed, (2) the transformation of the word from visual to acoustic code occurs before the analysis of the individual letters, and (3) individual differences in efficiency of target detection depend on a subject's over-all response time.

Adolescent↗