Adult age differences in cued recall.

Examined the relative effectiveness of semantic and structural retrieval cues in 72 male college graduates of 3 age groups: Group 1 (aged 20–39 yrs), Group 2 (aged 40–59 yrs), and Group 3 (aged 60–80 yrs). The Ss had been administered 2 subtests of the WAIS to insure the compatibility of the Ss. Results of the recall tests show that there was significantly poorer recall by the older Ss in the noncued conditions (free recall) and in the cued condition when structural cues were used. When category labels were used as semantic cues, however, the age deficit in recall was eliminated. Results are discussed in terms of both a retrieval hypothesis and a processing-deficit hypothesis. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in recall of performed and nonperformed items.

Memory for performed cognitive activities (e.g., psychometric tests of intelligence), for performed brief actions (e.g., hand wave), and for nonperformed items (e.g., written words) was assessed for 102 older and 101 younger adults. Although enactment improved recall, the beneficial effects of enactment were the same for both age groups. In fact, more than 80% of the age-related variance in memory for performed items was shared with memory for nonperformed items. Working memory and perceptual speed were important to the age differences in memory for both types of items. Performed and nonperformed items showed different serial position effects. However, the correlation between memory for the 2 types of items was high, especially for older adults, suggesting that the 2 types of memory share many common processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in the temporal characteristics of category free recall.

Two experiments are reported that examined the temporal structure of recall for categorizable word lists by younger and older adults. All participants showed response bursting, in which recall order is clustered by semantic category, with longer interresponse times (IRTs) appearing between categories than within categories. Experiment 1 demonstrated that older adults, even when matched to younger adults in overall accuracy, differed in the rate of increase of between-category IRTs with output position, but not in within-category IRTs. Experiment 2 showed that this interaction is eliminated when the names of the response categories are provided to the participants. Results are interpreted in terms of combined effects of an age-compromised episodic memory system (between-category IRTs) accompanied by a comparatively preserved semantic system (within-category IRTs) in healthy aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Information processing and age differences in social decision-making.

A task analysis indicated that equality, group enhancement, and superiority social decisions require a greater information processing load (i.e., are relatively complex) than altruism, rivalry, and individualism social decisions. Four experiments were conducted to validate the task analysis and to examine the influence of a social decision-making task modification designed to reduce the information processing demands of the equality and superiority social decisions. The results indicate the following: (1) 39 undergraduates took longer to identify the complex than the simple social outcomes. (2) The undergraduates and 57 36–93 mo olds made more errors identifying the complex than the simple social outcomes, and the 36–93 mo olds who made complex social decisions made fewer outcome identification errors, particularly for the complex social outcomes, than those who made simple social decisions. (3) A modification of the social outcome identification task produced a reduction in the outcome identification error rates among 24 48–93 mo olds, particularly for the complex social outcomes. (4) A modification of the social decision-making task eliminated the age differences in social decision-making across a 36–70 mo old age range in 55 Ss. A cognitive social learning interpretation is discussed. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A recency-based account of the primacy effect in free recall.

Seven experiments investigated the role of rehearsal in free recall to determine whether accounts of recency effects based on the ratio rule could be extended to provide an account of primacy effects based on the number, distribution, and recency of the rehearsals of the study items. Primacy items were rehearsed more often and further toward the end of the list than middle items, particularly with a slow presentation rate (Experiment 1) and with high-frequency words (Experiment 2). Recency, but not primacy, was reduced by a filled delay (Experiment 3), although significant recency survived a filled retention interval when a fixed-rehearsal strategy was used (Experiment 4). Experimenter-presented schedules of rehearsals resulted in similar serial position curves to those observed with participant generated rehearsals (Experiment 5) and were used to confirm the main findings in Experiments 6 and 7. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memorability functions as an indicator of qualitative age differences in text recall.

An analysis in which the probability of text unit recall for older adults [p(Re|O)] is plotted as a function of this probability for the young [p(Re|Y)] is considered as one way to assess whether there are qualitative differences in text recall for young and old. The application of this relative memorability analysis to previously reported data dealing with the immediate recall of spoken sentences (Stine, Wingfield, & Poon, 1986) revealed that although older adults show qualitative recall similar to younger adults when informational density is low, they show less discrimination among text elements when informational density is increased. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Overriding age differences in attentional capture with top-down processing.

Two experiments investigated the influence of top-down information on adult age differences in the ability to search for singleton targets using spatial cues. In Experiment 1, both younger and older adults were equally able to use target-related top-down information (target feature predictability) to avoid attentional capture by uninformative (25% valid) cues. However, during informative (75% valid) cue conditions, older adults demonstrated less efficient use of this cue-related top-down information. The authors extended these findings in Experiment 2 using cues that were either consistent or inconsistent with top-down feature settings. Results from this second experiment showed that although older adults were capable of avoiding attentional capture when provided with top-down information related to target features, capture effects for older adults were notably larger than those of younger adults when only bottom-up information was available. The authors suggest that older adults' ability to use top-down information during search to avoid or attend to cues may be resource-limited. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in controlled and automatic memory processing.

The memory performance of groups of younger, middle-aged, and older participants was tested on indirect and direct tests of word stem completion and on a process-dissociation task. As expected, on the direct tests of stem completion, older participants had lower scores than the younger and middle-aged groups. Age effects were also found on the indirect word completion test. The process-dissociation task allowed memory performance to be divided into controlled and automatic processing components. Estimates of automatic processing were comparable for the three groups, but there was an age effect for controlled processing, with the middle-aged and older groups differing from the younger group. These results confirm the findings of J. M. Jennings and L. L. Jacoby (1993) and suggest that the decline in conscious processing efficiency begins in middle age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in dream recall.

Ss who typically fail to remember dreams at home (nonreporters) and Ss who frequently remember dreams (reporters) slept in the laboratory for 4 nights each. Gradual or abrupt awakenings were made at each EEG Stage-I REM (dream) period. Although nonreporters and reporters did not differ in REM-period frequency or EEG patterns during sleep, nonreporters did report dreaming less frequently following REM-period awakenings. Ss showed self-consistency in frequency of dream reporting and in type of failure to report. Some nonreporters typically failed to remember any content; others typically said they were awake and thinking. Comparisons among reporters and sub-groups of nonreporters for eye-movement frequency, arousal threshold, and dreamlike-report content indicate that it may be useful to distinguish different kinds of nonreporters. (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in the inhibition of recall as a function of retrieval cues.

Asked 64 Ss from 3 age ranges (18–37, 50–64, and 65–88 yrs) to look at word lists in which the words were either categorized under headings or additionally subcategorized. Ss were then asked to recall the words when (a) the category name was given, or (b) the category name and half of the list words were given. Words recalled decreased with increasing age in all conditions. The youngest age group recalled more words when the category name only was used as a recall cue. There were no significant differences between the 2 recall conditions for the other age groups, suggesting that they were not as susceptible to recall inhibition as the younger adults. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in the allocation of study time account for age differences in memory performance

How aging affects the utilization of monitoring in the allocation of study time was investigated by having adults learn paired associates during multiple study-test trials. During each trial, a subject paced the presentation of individual items and later judged the likelihood of recalling each item on the upcoming test; after all items had been studied and judged, recall occurred. For both age groups in Study 1, (1) people's judgments were highly accurate at predicting recall and (2) intraindividual correlations between judgments (or recall) on one trial, and study times on the next trial were negative, which suggests that subjects utilized monitoring to allocate study time. However, the magnitude of these correlations was less for older than for younger adults. Study 2 revealed that these differences were not due to age differences in forgetting. Results from both studies suggest that older adults do not utilize on-line monitoring to allocate study to the same degree as younger adults do, and that these differences in allocation contribute to age deficits in recall.     

Effects of increased processing demands on age differences in working memory.

Three studies investigated (a) the plausibility of the claim that increasing the processing demands in a memory task contributes to greater involvement of a central processor and (b) the effects of altering reliance on the central processor on the magnitude of age-related differences in working-memory tasks. In the first study, young adults performed versions of 2 tasks presumed to vary in the degree of reliance on the central processor. In the second and third studies, young and older adults performed versions of a computation-span task that were assumed to vary along a rough continuum of the amount of required processing. The results indicated that although a central processor appears to be involved when working-memory tasks require simultaneous storage and processing of information, age related differences in working memory seem to be determined at least as much by differences in the capacity of storage as by differences in the efficacy of processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in recall and recognition.

An experiment is reported in which young and elderly adults performed cued-recall and recognition tests while carrying out a choice reaction-time task. An analysis of covariance, with recognition performance as the covariate, showed a reliable age decrement in recall. It was therefore concluded that older people perform more poorly on recall tasks than they do on recognition tasks. Performance on the secondary (reaction time) task showed that recall was associated with greater resource "costs" than was recognition and that this effect was amplified by increasing age. The results are in line with the suggestion that recall requires more processing resources than does recognition and that such resources are depleted as people grow older. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in the effects of goals on self-regulated sentence processing.

The authors examined age differences in adults' allocation of effort when reading text for either high levels of recall accuracy or high levels of efficiency. Participants read a series of sentences, making judgments of learning before recall. Older adults showed less sensitivity than the young to the accuracy goal in both reading time allocation and memory performance. Memory accuracy and differential allocation of effort to unlearned items were age equivalent, so age differences in goal adherence were not attributable to metacognitive factors. However, comparison with data from a control reading task without monitoring showed that learning gains among older adults across trial were reduced relative to those of the young by memory monitoring, suggesting that monitoring may be resource consuming for older learners. Age differences in the responsiveness to (information-acquisition) goals could be accounted for, in part, by independent contributions from working memory and memory self-efficacy. Our data suggest that both processing capacity ("what you have") and beliefs ("knowing you can do it") can contribute to individual differences in engaging resources ("what you do") to effectively learn novel content from text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A transfer-appropriate processing account of context effects in word-fragment completion.

The claim that priming on implicit memory tasks such as word-fragment completion is sensitive to context effects was tested by using homographs (e.g., board) to manipulate context. On the basis of previous findings, it was assumed that presentation of only the perceptual cue at test (oa d) should activate the dominant meaning, thereby creating the same context for homographs encoded for their dominant encoding and a different context for homographs encoded for their nondominant meaning. As expected, little or no effect of varying context was observed on a perceptual implicit task (Experiments 1–2B). When explicit retrieval instructions were given in Experiment 3, same-context encoding led to greater recall of homographs from word-fragment cues relative to different-context encoding. These results are consistent with the predictions of the transfer-appropriate-processing view because little advantage for the same-context condition was obtained in implicit tests in the absence of conceptual cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modeling intrusions and correct recall in episodic memory: Adult age differences in encoding of list context.

A model for correct recall and intrusions in cued recall of word lists is introduced. Intrusions are false responses that were correct in an earlier list. The model assumes 3 exclusive states for memory traces after encoding: with a list tag (i.e., with information about list origin), without list tags, and missing. Across lists, a trace can lose its list tag or its content. For retrieval, an optimal strategy of response selection was assumed. Younger and older laboratory-trained mnemonists participated in 2 experiments in which recall of permutations of a single word list across a single set of cues was held constant with individually adjusted presentation times. With correct recall equated to younger adults, older adults were more susceptible to intrusions. Age differences were restricted to model parameters estimating the probability of generation of list tags. Alternative accounts of age differences in context memory are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of emotional valence on age differences in early processing and memory.

This study examined older and younger adults' attentional biases and subsequent incidental recognition memory for distracting positive, negative, and neutral words. Younger adults were more distracted by negative stimuli than by positive or neutral stimuli, and they correctly recognized more negative than positive words. Older adults, however, attended equally to all stimuli yet showed reliable recognition only for positive words. Thus, although an attentional bias toward negative words carried over into recognition performance for younger adults, older adults' bias appeared to be limited to remembering positive information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A meta-analysis of age differences in job performance.

In a meta-analysis, 40 samples were classified into 3 categories according to the types of performance measures used: (a) supervisory ratings, (b) peer ratings, and (c) individual productivity. Results show a pattern of increases in performance, as measured by productivity indices, at higher ages. Conversely, supervisory ratings showed a slight tendency to be lower for older employees. Performance ratings showed more positive relations with age for professionals than for nonprofessionals. Implications concerning personnel policies regarding older employees are discussed. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality differences in the capacity for verbal recall.

Based upon an analysis of differences in ego organization the hypothesis was offered that "anal retentive" individuals have a greater ability to recall verbal material than "anal expulsives." Ss were 61 female college freshmen and the Blacky Test was the criterion of "anality." It was found that "anal retentives" recalled verbal material significantly better than "expulsives" during both an immediate and a delayed recall test. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)