Cognitive addition: Strategy choice and speed-of-processing differences in gifted, normal, and mathematically disabled children.

Sixty young and 60 elderly adults completed a pencil-and-paper addition test and solved 40 computer-presented simple addition problems. Strategies and problem solution times were recorded on a trial-by-trial basis and were classified in accordance with the distributions of associations model of strategy choices. The elderly group showed a performance advantage on the ability measure and for the developmental maturity of the mix of problem-solving strategies, but the young group showed an advantage for overall solution times. A componential analysis of the overall solution times for memory retrieval trials, however, showed no reliable age difference for rate of retrieving addition facts from long-term memory but did suggest that the elderly adults might have been slower than the younger adults for rate of encoding digits and verbally producing an answer. Overall results are interpreted within the context of the strategy choice model. The first purpose of this study was to extend into adulthood normative information on the development of problem-solving strategies in addition. The second purpose was to compare the performance of young and elderly adults on a relatively well-understood cognitive task: the mental solution of simple addition