Developmental Psychology 1982, Vol. 18, No. 3,473- 473-484 Copyright 1982 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0012-1649/82/1803-0473500.75 Visual Abstraction Processes in Young and Old Adults Thomas M. Hess Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, Duke University Medical Center The conceptual skills of young and old adults were examined using Franks and Bransford's visual abstraction procedure. This allowed the study of concept ab- straction independent of problem solving skills, which greatly influence perfor- mance in traditional concept acquisition tasks. In Experiments 1 and 2, young and old adults did not differ in their ability to abstract central tendency infor- mation from a class of nonmeaningful stimuli. Both groups classified novel stimuli in terms of transformational distance from a central representation (or prototype) of these patterns. Both groups also abstracted information regarding relations into which attributes could enter, and discriminated between test patterns re- flecting acceptable and unacceptable transformations. It is suggested that visual abstraction performance might reflect the encoding of frequency information,, which is presumed to be an automatic process founded in innate structures and which is observed to remain stable with age. A third experiment found that older adults experienced greater interference in acquisition when the new concept was based on a reorganization of attributes associated with an established conceptual structure. The ability to form conceptual structures to represent and interpret environmental ev- ents is one of the most fundamental and im- portant skills in an individual's cognitive rep- ertoire. Concepts provide an economical way of dealing with the environment by relating seemingly diverse stimuli along common rel- evant attribute dimensions, thereby enabling us to deal with an enormous degree of com- plexity using a manageable number of in- terpretive structures. Whereas the impor- tance of concept formation skills has long been recognized by developmentalists study- ing the growing child's adaptational pro- cesses, few experimental investigations have examined such skills in older adults. Existing research with older adults has dealt with the problem of concept acquisition using traditional concept identification tasks (cf. Giambra & Arenberg, 1980). In these tasks, relatively meaningless materials (e.g., geometric shapes) that vary along one or more dimensions (e.g., color, size) are pre- sented over a series of trials. Through in- spection and experimenter-provided feed- back, the subject determines which of the dimensional attributes are relevant in defin- Requests for reprints should be sent to Thomas M. Hess, who is now at Department of Psychology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27650. ing concept membership. Once the relevant attributes have been identified, all further stimuli can be easily classified based on the presence or absence of these cues. Studies using such tasks have shown that older adults take longer to identify the concept (Hayslip & Sterns, 1979), are less likely to adopt and maintain appropriate strategies (Offenbach, 1974), and are more adversely affected by irrelevant information (Hoyer, Rebok, & Sved, 1979). Several problems exist, however, in gen- eralizing about older adults' conceptual skills from the results of these studies. First of all, the traditional concept identification task described above relies heavily on problem- solving skills (Giambra & Arenberg, 1980; Rosch, 1977), including the identification and use of appropriate strategies, and the storage and retrieval of previous information for comparison to current stimulus infor- mation. If the elderly are deficient in choos- ing appropriate strategies or in efficiently encoding and retrieving previously presented information, their performance on these tasks may actually reflect their deficiencies in these skills rather than their ability to form new concepts. For example, Brinley, Jovick, and McLaughlin (1974) found that , older adults exhibited a disproportionate benefit in concept identification when reten- 473