A developmental study of adults' performance on traditional and practical problem-solving tasks.

Ninety-six individuals between the ages of 20 and 80 were presented with two types of problem-solving tasks. One was a traditional laboratory problem-solving task; the other was composed of a number of practical problems. Three types of practical problems were employed--problems that young adults might encounter in their daily lives, problems that middle-aged adults might encounter, and problems that elderly adults might encounter. On the traditional laboratory task, performance decreased with increasing age. On the practical problems, however, performance increased from the 20- to the 30-year-old group and decreased thereafter with the most drastic decreases occurring in the 60- and 70-year-old groups. When the three types of practical problems were analyzed separately, the performance of the younger adults was better than the performance of older adults on all of the problem-solving tasks, even on the practical problems that were designed specifically to be ones that older adults would be more likely to encounter in their daily lives.