Age differences in predictions and performance on a cued recall task (original) (raw)
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A processing resource account of age differences in recall
Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie, 1982
It is hypothesized that age deficits in recall are due to a reduction in available processing resource. It is argued that the formation of a distinct encoding in which unique aspects of the context are integrated with the target item requires a substantial amount of attentional resource, but that the core semantic features of words are encoded relatively automatically. Thus, under conditions of reduced processing resource, a general, stereotyped encoding will result. The effectiveness of general, categorical retrieval cues was compared to the effectiveness of contextually specific retrieval cues in three experiments. Young adults recalled more than old adults when they were cued with specific retrieval cues, but no age differences were observed when general retrieval cues were used. A similar pattern of results was obtained when the amount of processing resource was experimentally reduced by requiring young adults to perform a concurrent task during encoding. Many recent views of human memory have been couched in terms of encoding processes, retrieval processes, and their interrelations. Within such a
Age differences in recollection: three patterns of enhanced encoding
Psychology and aging, 2007
Memory encoding conditions can be manipulated in a variety of ways, and many of these methods result in improved recollection for both younger and older adults relative to baseline conditions. Previous results have shown differential age-related patterns of improvement, however, with some manipulations giving equal improvement to young and old participants, some benefiting older adults more, and others benefiting younger adults more. In 2 experiments, the authors show that presenting pictures with words benefited older more than younger participants, word generation benefited both groups equally, and an encoding condition requiring novel integrative processing benefited younger more than older adults. The authors discuss these results in terms of the enhanced elaboration afforded and processing demanded by differential combinations of age groups and encoding conditions.
Cortex, 2003
Memory performance by four age groups (30-45 years, 46-60 years, 61-75 years, and 76-90 years) was compared on a multi-trial verbal recall task with 20-minute and 1-day delay free recall and recognition trials. The rate of acquisition across 5 learning trials was similar for all ages except the youngest group whose performance was constrained by a ceiling effect. The level of acquisition achieved was less in the two oldest groups. Words gained across trials and words lost across trials made similar contributions to the shape of the learning curve for the acquisition trials. Subjective organization decreased with age, but remained strongly related to the number of words recalled during acquisition for all age groups. The two oldest age groups demonstrated significant declines in words recalled on the 20-minute and 1-day delay trials. A subset of the oldest group demonstrated more rapid forgetting at the 1-day delay when participants from all age conditions were matched on acquisition. Thus, many aspects of free recall were impaired with age, and variance measurement of recall showed greater inter-individual differences with increasing age. This increase in individual differences could reflect a single form of age-related memory impairment, or it could indicate that memory impairment in the elderly is due to multiple processes. The importance of testing across the life span and using tests that examine a variety of memory components and processes for establishing norms and clarifying agerelated deficits are discussed.
Age differences in recall and recognition
Journal of Experimental Psychology: …, 1987
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.
Adult age differences in short-term forgetting
Acta Psychologica, 1985
Two experiments are reported in which young and old adults performed in a Brown-Peterson task. In the first experiment young adults recalled with greater accuracy than old adults and the difference between age groups was greater in delayed than in immediate recall. Performance varied inversely with interpolated task difficulty in the delayed recall condition, but this effect did not interact with age. In the second experiment an attempt was made to equate immediate recall performances of old and young adults to determine if age differences in the rate of forgetting are independent of age differences in registration. Each participant was pre-tested to determine the number of stimulus repetitions needed to achieve a minimum of 83% correct in immediate serial recall of 6-letter sequences. The number of repetitions an individual required in pre-testing was then used in a subsequent Brown-Peterson task. No significant age differences in delayed recall were obtained when immediate recall differences were minimized by differential repetition of to-be-remembered sequences, The results of these experiments suggest that age differences in forgetting rates arise from age-related differences in encoding and storage.
Age differences in recall and predicting recall of action events and words
The Journals …, 1996
Age differences in recall and predictions of recall were examined with different memory tasks. We asked 36 younger (19-28 yrs) and 36 older (60-81 yrs) women to provide both global and item-by-item predictions of their recall, and then to recall either (a) Subject Performance Tasks (SPTs), (b) verb-noun word-pairs memorized in list-like fashion (Word-Pairs), or (c) nonsense verb-noun word-pairs (Nonsense-Pairs) over three experimental trials. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that these tasks would vary in relative difficulty and flexibility of encoding. The results indicated that (a) age differences in global predictions (task specific self-efficacy) and recall performance across trials were minimized with SPT as compared with verbal materials, (b) global predictions were higher and more accurate for SPT as compared to verbal materials, and (c) item-by-item predictions were most accurate for materials encoded with the most flexibility (Nonsense Pairs). The results suggest that SPTs may provide some level of environmental support to reduce age differences in performance and task-specific self-efficacy, but that memory monitoring may depend on specific characteristics of the stimuli (i.e., flexibility of encoding) rather than their verbal or nonverbal nature. S UBJECT Performed Tasks (SPTs) are one form of activity memory that involves memory for actions performed in everyday life (West, 1986). Specifically, SPTs are discreet, one-step actions (e.g., fold the paper, cross your legs) that individuals are asked to perform and subsequently recall. SPTs have been examined by researchers interested in
Age-Related Differences in Cued Recall: Effects of Support at Encoding and Retrieval
Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 2002
The literature is unclear about the relative contributions of environmental supporting conditions to younger and older adults' episodic memory performance. The work reported addresses the conditions under which different support patterns are obtained. In three experiments, younger and older adults learned picture-word pairs and were then tested with a cued-recall task. Supportive conditions included semantic relations between the pair members (all experiments), and ®rst-letter cues for the target words at retrieval (Experiments 2 and 3). Results of the three experiments indicated different patterns of support for younger and older adults, depending on the number and location of the supporting conditions used. These different patterns are in line with the suggestion that whereas younger adults bene®t substantially from support at encoding only, older adults require support at both encoding and retrieval. Alternative accounts of the results are also discussed.
Age effects in cued recall: Sources from implicit and explicit memory
Psychology and Aging, 1995
In 2 experiments, young and old adults were compared on cued recall using direct and indirect test instructions. Participants studied words under an incidental orienting task of rating each word for concreteness. Test cues were meaningfully related to the targets, and participants used them either to recall the studied word (direct test) or to generate a related word (indirect test). Target words and test cues varied in the number of associates linked to them prior to the laboratory experience, and effects of the size of the sets of associates were used as indicators of implicit memory search. Age differences were observed in the effects of target and cue set size as well as in the effects of type of test instruction. Older adults perform less well than younger adults on laboratory tests of memory, such as cued recall or recognition, that explicitly require the deliberate recall of recently experienced stimuli. The age difference is less apparent on memory tasks that test for implicit evidence of the recent experience without requiring deliberate recall, such as perceptual identification and lexical decision. These two categories of tasks are referred to, respectively, as tests of explicit and implicit memory (see Light, 1991, for review) or as direct and indirect measures of memory (Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988). Indirect tests of memory have been of interest to psychologists studying cognitive aging because the tests seem to suggest the existence of memory structures or memory processes that are relatively well preserved throughout the adult years. Several mechanisms have been proffered to explain implicit memory performance, including the possibility that implicit tasks involve the activation of preexisting knowledge (Graf & Mandler, 1984), which may be unaffected by age. This explanation is compatible with findings from lexical decision and other tasks that suggest relatively intact semantic networks for older adults (
Effects of Age and a Divided Attention Task Presented During Encoding and Retrieval on Memory
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1989
The present studies were designed to examine age differences in memory when attention was divided during encoding, retrieval, or at both times. In Experiment 1, Ss studied categorized words while performing a number-monitoring task during encoding, retrieval, or at both times. Older Ss' free recall and clustering performance declined more than that of young Ss when attention was divided at encoding, but there was no similar age interaction when divided attention occurred at retrieval. In Experiment 2, the task demands at retrieval were increased by using a fast-paced, cued-recall task. The results remained unchanged from Experiment 1. Again, an age interaction occurred with divided attention at encoding but not at retrieval. These results were unexpected, given the emphasis in the memory-aging literature on increased difficulty of retrieval by older adults. The findings pose difficulties for limited processing resource views of age differences in memory.
Ageing and Memory: Mechanisms Underlying Age Differences in Performance
Australasian Journal on Ageing, 1998
Although it is widely believed that memory generally declines with age, in fact, age decrements occur for most, but not for all, types of memory. Age differences are always found for free and cued recall but are rarely found for picture recognition, implicit memory and measures of verbal ability. Understanding the conditions under which age differences occur and when they do not across memory domain is a challenging puzzle for cognitive ageing researchers. The hypothesis adopted here is that the magnitude of age-related decrements in memory function across different domains of memory can be accounted for by the amount of processing resource or mental effort required to encode and retrieve information. Different conceptualisations of processing resource are explored and supporting data are reviewed.