RESULTS

All groups had good WAIS-R vocabulary scores, with no group showing a particular advantage, F(3,348) = 1.22, p = .30. Also, participants showed good short-term memory abilities. Analysis of variance and post hoc pairwise Scheffe comparison revealed that the youngest group did have higher memory scores in comparison to the two eldest groups for both the Forward digit, F(3,349) = 4.53, p < .01, MSE = 1.34, and backward digit , F(3,348) = 10.33, p < .001, MSE = 1.49, subtests of the WAIS-R. There was a main effect of age-group on Boston Naming scores, F(3,345) = 6.79, p < .001 , and post hoc comparisons revealed that this effect is due to poorer performance for the oldest group in relation to the two younger groups. This decrease in performance levels for the Boston naming test is typical and expected in that age group (La Rue,1992). The reasoning test also revealed poorer performance with increasing age, where a significant main effect for age F(3,339) = 13.07, p < .001 supports the typical finding of small but reliable age differences. The digit-symbol manipulation task also brought about the expected pattern of a decline in performance with age, F(3,337) = 75.48, p < .001, as well as via a significant Pearson correlation between all participants age in years and their scores on the digit symbol task, r (338) = - .67.

Some interesting results included correlations showing that people who watched more TV had lower verbal skills. This was true for all age groups. Correlations also revealed that when young people rated themselves as mentally active they also tended toward having higher scores in the cognitive tasks, but there was no relationship between mental engagement ratings and higher cognitive scores in the older samples.