Morrell, R.W., & Park, D.C. (1993). The effects of age, illustrations, and task variables on the performance of procedural assembly tasks. Psychology and Aging, 8(3), 389-399.

Morrell, R.; Park, D.

1993

Morrell, R.W., & Park, D.C. (1993). The effects of age, illustrations, and task variables on the performance of procedural assembly tasks. Psychology and Aging, 8(3), 389-399.

Older adults may be disadvantaged in the performance of procedural assembly tasks because of age-related declines in working memory operations. It was hypothesized that adding illustrations to instructional text may lessen age-related performance differences by minimizing processing demands on working memory in the elderly. In the present study, younger and older adults constructed a series of 3-dimensional objects from 3 types of instructions (text only, illustration only, or text and illustrations). Results indicated that instructions consisting of text and illustrations reduced errors in construction for both age groups compared with the other formats. Younger adults, however, outperformed older adults under all instructional format conditions. Measures of spatial and verbal working memory and text comprehension ability accounted for substantial age-related variance across the different format conditions but did not fully account for the age differences observed.

First, older adults consistently made more errors of both types and took more time to perform the assembly tasks than did the younger adults. Second, both younger and older adults made more final and misfit errors as the figures became more difficult to assemble. Older adults, however, were more affected by difficulty than were younger adults in both instances. Finally, performance was clearly influenced by the type of instructional format used. More final errors were made in the illustrations-only condition compared with the other formats, but both age groups also took the least amount of time to construct their figures in the illustrations- only condition. For misfit errors, however, more errors were made in the text-only condition relative to the other formats.

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