Abstract: A comparative study on the cognitive pattern of 12 tasks in aging was accomplished by using the methods of language-operation and man-computer interaction in 242 subjects of 46 to 75 years of age.The results indicated:1) Some cognitive performances decreased obviously with age,such as symbol-digit, visual digit span, auditory digit span,pairedassociation learning,free recall of picture and recognition of meaningless figure But other cognitive performances did not decrease with age, such as picture classification,card classification,arithmetic and progressive matrices.2) It was examined that the cognitive speed of 4 nonlexical tasks slowed down progressively with age,these tasks were arithmetic,symbol-digit,digit discrimination and count.

Key words: cognitive performance, cognitive speed, aging