Hale S
Washington University, Department of Psychology, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899.
Child Dev. 1990 Jun;61(3):653-63.
Children respond more slowly than young adults on a variety of information-processing tasks. The global trend hypothesis posits that processing speed changes as a function of age, and that all component processes change at the same rate. A unique prediction of this hypothesis is that the overall response latencies of children of a particular age should be predictable from the latencies of young adults performing the same tasks--without regard to the specific componential makeup of the task. The current effort tested this prediction by examining the performance of 4 age groups (10-, 12-, 15-, and 19-year-olds) on 4 different tasks (choice reaction time, letter matching, mental rotation, and abstract matching). An analysis that simultaneously examined performance on all 4 tasks provided strong support for the global trend hypothesis. By plotting each child group's performance on all 4 tasks as a function of the young adult group's performance in the corresponding task conditions, precise linear functions were revealed: 10-year-olds were approximately 1.8 times slower than young adults on all tasks, and 12-year-olds were approximately 1.5 times slower, whereas 15-year-olds appeared to process information as fast as young adults.
在各种信息处理任务中，儿童的反应比年轻人更慢。整体趋势假说认为，处理速度会随着年龄的变化而变化，并且所有组成过程都以相同的速率变化。该假说的一个独特预测是，特定年龄儿童的总体反应潜伏期应该可以根据执行相同任务的年轻人的潜伏期来预测——而不考虑任务的具体组成结构。当前的研究通过考察4个年龄组（10岁、12岁、15岁和19岁）在4种不同任务（选择反应时、字母匹配、心理旋转和抽象匹配）上的表现来检验这一预测。一项同时考察所有4项任务表现的分析为整体趋势假说提供了有力支持。通过将每个儿童组在所有4项任务上的表现绘制为相应任务条件下年轻人组表现的函数，揭示了精确的线性函数：10岁儿童在所有任务上的速度比年轻人慢约1.8倍，12岁儿童慢约1.5倍，而15岁儿童处理信息的速度似乎与年轻人一样快。
