engleski

Age and gender related differences in speed of information processing: A developmental study on elementary school children

Speed of information processing (SIP) reflects the rate of execution of elementary cognitive processes present in all cognitive tasks (perception, encoding, short-term memory scanning, long-term memory retrieval, comparison, etc.). It plays a key role in contemporary intelligence models, and age related changes of SIP have been considered as one of the major cognitive development determinants. While SIP development during childhood and adolescence has been thoroughly researched, gender differences and their developmental pattern are rarely reported. This research has been conducted as a part of a comprehensive study of education and schooling in Croatia and as such it yielded opportunity of large samples assessment and of detecting potential gender differences of SIP. The sample included 4079 male and 4059 female elementary school students in developmental range from 8 to 15 years, with sub-samples not less then 550 subjects per age group. Students were tested with a form of Wechlers Coding test, and retested after 7 month period with the parallel form of the test. Data corroborate well documented developmental growth of SIP but also reveal that girls outperform boys at all ages in analyzed range. These gender differences increase as students approach puberty. Retest confirmed this pattern of developmental differences, but with a significant shift to higher values in all age groups and at both genders. This improvement of SIP between two measurements is probably the consequence of maturation and practice and it’ s larger at lower ages. Developmental curves of SIP are analyzed for both genders and both measurements.

speed of information processing; age; gender

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