Among the goals of this project is to describe adult age differences and age changes in nonverbal memory performance. Nonverbal memory is measured in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BSLA) with the Benton Visual Rentention Test (BVRT). Previous analyses of six-year and twelve-year longitudinal data indicated that for men, performance on the BVRT declines late in life. This year, extensive analyses of individual regression measures of change found substantial mean declines in the groups of men who were in their sixties or seventies when first testes. The correlation of age with change was-.38. These regression measures of change were based on 12 years (3 points) or 18 years (4 points) of longitudinal data. Also this year, the BVRT was one of the measures included in a comparison of noninsulin dependent diabetic men with healthy age-matched men. There is some controversy in the literature about the effects of diabetes on congnitive performance; all of those studies were cross-sectional. No differences were found in the cross-sectional analysis or the longitudinal comparisons of change in BVRT performance in the BLSA. No support was found for the hypothesis that diabetes accelerates age delcines in cognitive performance.
