Are go/no-go tasks preferable to two-choice tasks in response time experiments with older adults?

Epub ahead of print 02/11/2015 Recent research has shown that, in response time (RT) tasks, the go/no-go response procedure produces faster (and less noisy) RTs and fewer errors than the two-choice response procedure in children, although these differences are substantially smaller in college-aged adults. Here we examined whether the go/no-go procedure can be preferred to the two-choice procedure in RT experiments with older adults (i.e. another population with slower and more error-prone responding than college-aged individuals). To that end, we compared these response procedures in two experiments with older adults (Mage = 83 years): a visual word recognition task (lexical decision) and a…