Age-Related Slowing in Online Samples

Three experiments assessed the use of online samples recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) worker pool for studying the psychology of aging. The results replicated several. benchmark findings: Older adults’ response times (RTs) improved more with practice, but their asymptotic RTs remained longer than those of the younger adults (Experiment 1); greater age-related declines were observed in visuospatial processing speed than in verbal speed (Experiment 2); and although working memory decreased with age, age was not a significant predictor of working memory once processing speed was statistically controlled (Experiment 3). The present results establish that online samples that include adults up to at least age 70 are easily recruited via MTurk and that the relations among age, speed, and working memory ability in such samples correspond to those typically observed in laboratory settings. These findings are important because using online samples to study aging provides a cost-effective way of collecting data from large samples of participants in a fraction of the time that it takes to conduct similar studies in the laboratory.