Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), a task in which participants must name a series of items as rapidly as possible, has been very useful as a measure of cognitive abilities that predict reading skill both in children and in young adults (YAs). This study examined RAN performance of 100 YAs and 80 cognitively healthy older adults (OAs). RAN performance was highly reliable but showed only a few weak correlations to other measures of individual differences used to study cognitive aging. RAN performance did not differ significantly by age group for symbolic RANs but was significantly slower for OAs than YAs for non-symbolic RANs. This pattern suggests that healthy aging is associated with little to no decline in the ability to sustain overlapping encoding and production of a sequence of items when it involves the form-to-form mapping required by symbolic RANs but with measurable decline in that ability when it involves the concept-to-form mapping required by non-symbolic RANs.

快速自动命名（RAN）是一项参与者必须尽快命名一系列项目的任务，它对于衡量预测儿童和年轻人（YAs）的阅读能力的认知能力非常有用。这项研究检查了100个YA和80个认知健康的老年人（OA）的RAN性能。RAN性能高度可靠，但与用于研究认知老化的其他个体差异测度仅显示出一些弱相关性。对于符号性RAN，RAN的性能在不同年龄组之间没有显着差异，但对于非符号性RAN，OA的YA性能明显慢于YA。