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Training Laboratory Rabbits to Refine Routine Husbandry Procedures
Published on: February 16, 2024
All data collection and analysis methods have limitations: reply to Rabbitt (2011) and Raz and Lindenberger (2011)
1Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400, USA. salthouse@virginia.edu
Abstract:
The commentaries on my article contain a number of points with which I disagree but also several with which I agree. For example, I continue to believe that the existence of many cases in which between-person variability does not increase with age indicates that greater variance with increased age is not inevitable among healthy individuals up to about 80 years of age. I also do not believe that problems of causal inferences from correlational information are more severe in the cognitive neuroscience of aging than in other research areas; I contend instead that neglect of these problems has led to confusion about neurobiological underpinnings of cognitive aging. I agree that researchers need to be cautious in extrapolating from cross-sectional to longitudinal relations, but I also note that even longitudinal data are limited with respect to their ability to support causal inferences.
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