PERFORMANCE OF ELDER PEOPLE IN MATHEMATICAL TASKS OF CONDITIONAL DISCRIMINATION AUDITIVE AND VISUAL

Abstract

The study of the aging process has been guided by sociological and developmental paradigms that take into account the biological factor as a causal variable of the deficits and performance. In another perspective, the analysis of the behavior considers that the interaction between the aged organism and the environment where it inserts itself can be handled to improve the quality of life and the behaviors emitted by elder people. Elder people have skills and potential to perform many activities and to continue learning when procedures are carefully designed and applied. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of elder people in mathematical tasks of conditional discrimination auditory and visual. The results showed that the visual-visual tasks were performed with the highest percentage of correct answers and shorter duration, when compared to the auditory-visual tasks. This difference suggests the possibility of alteration in the capacity to remember the sample stimulus and/or difficulty of treating stimuli with different physical properties as equivalent. Once the elders of the community showed, since the beginning, very high percentages of correct answers and very low reaction time, it was not possible to assess changes in relations throughout the experiment. On the other hand, changes in the performance of the elderly that live in the institution were higher when comparing the beginning and the end of the experiment, for percent of accuracy and for the reaction time. The results indicated that the computerized procedure was efficient to evaluate the behavior changes for both types of tasks.Keywords: analysis of the behavior, stimulus equivalence, mathematic, elderly