Card Sorting Task Performance in a Community Sample of Young and Elderly Adults

We developed an automated scoring procedure following the recent recommendations on scoring perseverative responses to make the results can be comparable to the standardized WCST. Reliability estimates of commonly used measures were calculated using the split-half method.We recruited 256 young (18 to 45 years) and old adults (55 to 81 years) from a community medical examination center of a subordinate county of Hefei city, Anhui providence of China when they attended their regular annual health screen through advertisement.

All participants had a corrected-to-normal vision. Six participants did not provid age, gender, or education information, and 30 participants who failed to complete the whole test were excluded from the analysis, leaving the final sample of 220 participants. The final young group included 65 females and 60 males (Age: M = 30.1 yrs, SD = 5.47 yrs) and the old group included 53 females and 60 males (Age: M = 64.0 yrs, SD = 6.65 yrs).