List and Text Recall Differ in Their Predictors: Replication Over Samples and Time (original) (raw)

2010, The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences

Lthough episodic recall is generally thought to decline with advancing age, regardless of the nature of the materials to be remembered (e.g., Zacks, hasher, & Li, 2000), recent work suggests that different mechanisms may be associated with particular recall tasks (Siedlecki, 2007). Studies training memory in older adults have failed to show transfer: Deployment of specific resources and abilities may be required depending on the task (see, e.g., Rebok, Carlson, & Langbaum, 2007). Models of broad memory factors may therefore not adequately distinguish sources of age and individual differences in specific remembering activities. Although list and text recall have been considered to be part of a latent verbal memory construct (e.g., van der Linden et al., 1999) and may be treated as markers of a higher order memory factor (e.g., hertzog, Dixon, hultsch, & MacDonald, 2003), including list and text recall in a single latent variable permits only the common memory variance from these tasks to be predicted. however, list recall shows larger average age declines than text recall when scores are identically calibrated with Rasch scaling (Zelinski & Kennison, 2007). List recall may decline more than text recall because it is more affected by age effects on fluid-like abilities or resources, such as speed or working memory, whereas text recall may be less affected by aging because fluid-like deficits are balanced by stability in crystallized-like abilities, such as vocabulary (see, e.g., Stine-Morrow, Miller, gagne, & hertzog, 2008, but see Johnson, 2003). Another reason why list and text recall should be examined separately is that recall of unrelated words and of discourse very likely involves different encoding and retrieval processes (e.g., Jefferies, Lambon Ralph, & Baddeley, 2004). Word list recall entails encoding and retrieving contextual and semantic item information. Light (1992) suggested that age deficits in list recall occur because of