Objectives: As individuals age, cognitive abilities such as working memory (WM), decline. In the current study, we investigated the effect of age on WM, and elucidated sources of errors.
Method: A total of 102 healthy individuals, aged 18 to 71, participated in this research. We designed and administered a face-based visual WM task, collecting responses via a graded scale in a delayed match-to-sample reproduction task.
Results: The error of participants increased significantly as they aged. Our analysis revealed a significant age-related rise in the standard deviation of error distribution. However, there was no significant change in uniform probability with age.
Conclusion: We found that WM performance declines through the lifespan. Investigating the sources of error, we found that the precision of WM decreased monotonously with age. The results also indicated that the probability of guessing the response as a measure of random response is not affected by age.
Keywords: Aging; continuous error; face; working memory; working memory task.