Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A set of tasks developed in accordance with Kosslyn. Van Kleeck. & Kirby's (1990b) neurologically plausible model of visual mental imagery was used to explore effects of aging on specific component processes involved in image generation and maintenance. Contrary to the widely held belief that age differences in cognition are attributable to a single mechanism of global effect (e.g., a reduction in critical processing resources, Salthouse, 1988), results indicate that processes involved in visual mental imagery are differentially age-sensitive. More precisely, components required to actively maintain images are particularly sensitive to effects of aging, while those that access visual information from memory are not especially affected. Advantages of a componential approach to understanding age differences in cognitive processing are disscussed, as well as the potential for such agerelated changes to be a readily exploitable source of information regarding the functional architecture of cognition.