Aging and longitudinal change in perceptual-motor skill acquisition in healthy adults.

Knowledge about aging of perceptual-motor skills is based almost exclusively on cross-sectional studies. We examined age-related changes in the retention of mirror-tracing skills in healthy adults who practiced for 3 separate days at baseline and retrained 5 years later at follow-up. Overall, the speed and accuracy of an acquired skill were partially retained after a 5-year interim, although the same asymptote was reached. Analyses with individual learning curves indicated that the effects of age on mirror-tracing speed were greater at longitudinal follow-up than at baseline, with older adults requiring more training to reach asymptote. Thus, although the long-term retention of acquired skills declines with age, older adults still retain the ability to learn the skill. Moreover, those who maintained a processing speed comparable with that of the younger participants evidenced no age-related performance decrements on the mirror-drawing task.