Among the goals of this project are to describe age differences and changes in reasoning performance and to investigate psychological processes underlying such age-related performance. Data collection continues for the longitudinal study of concept problem solving of men and women. Cross-sectional analyses of the women's concept-problem-solving performance produced results quite similar to those for the men. The mean number of problems solved correctly delcined monotonically from the twenties to the eighties, and the correlation with age was -.43. Measures of effectiveness for three types of problems were also correlated with age. The correlation between age and effectiveness on complex problems with low initial information was -.73, the highest age correlation ever found for cognitive performance in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging.
