Leah L. Light

Implicit and explicit memory in young and older adults.

In three experiments, young and older adults were compared on both implicit and explicit memory tasks. The size of repetition priming effects in word completion and in perceptual identification tasks did not differ reliably across ages. However, age-related decrements in performance were obtained in free recall, cued recall, and recognition. These results, similar to those observed in amnesics, suggest that older adults are impaired on tasks which require conscious recollection but that memory which depends on automatic activation processes in relatively unaffected by age.

Adult age differences in repetition priming: a meta-analysis.

This article reports a meta-analysis comparing the size of repetition priming effects in young and older adults. The main analysis included 39 effect sizes. Of these, 23 effect sizes could be classified as involving item priming and 16 as involving associative priming. The weighted mean effect size for the age difference was .304, with a confidence interval from .217 to .392. Because the confidence interval did not include 0, the hypothesis of no age difference in repetition priming was rejected. Subsidiary analyses, however, revealed that the weighted mean effect size for repetition priming was smaller than those for recognition or recall measures from the set of experiments included in the effect-size meta-analysis. Difficulties in drawing conclusions about process dissociations in old age in the face of only a partial dissociation in experimental measures are considered.

Language, memory, and aging

Preface 1. Theories of information processing and theories of aging 2. Effects of aging on verbal abilities: examination of the psychometric literature 3. Aging and individual differences in memory for written discourse 4. Geriatric psycholinguistics: syntactic limitations of oral and written language 5. Aging and memory activation: the priming of semantic and episodic memories 6. Automatic and effortful semantic processes in old age: experimental and naturalistic approaches 7. Integrating information from discourse: do older adults show deficits? 8. Comprehension of pragmatic implications in young and older adults 9. Capacity theory and the processing of inferences 10. Age differences in memory for texts: production deficiency or processing liminations? 11. Episodic memory and knowledge interactions across adulthood 12. The disorder of naming in Alzheimers disease 13. Language and memory processing in semile dementia Alzheimers type 14. Patterns of language and memory in old age Author index Subject index.

Dissociation of memory and awareness in young and older adults

Young (mean age = 23.41 years) and older (mean age = 69.41 years) adults studied a list of 80 words. They were tested immediately and 7 days later for both yes/no recognition and for ability to complete fragments such as E D L M, with words, some of which had been studied previously. The fragment completion task was not described as a memory test and subjects were encouraged to respond to all word fragments. Younger adults scored higher on recognition than older adults but not on fragment completion. These results, similar to those obtained with amnesics, suggest that older adults are impaired on tasks which require a conscious effort to recognize an event but that memory without awareness is unaffected by age.

Memory and Aging

Publisher Summary This chapter examines four accounts of the nature of memory impairment in old age. These range from the view that poorer memory in old age arises from inefficient encoding and retrieval strategies that are subject to remediation by appropriate interventions to less optimistic views that declining memory is the result of irreversible age-related changes in basic mechanisms underlying cognition, such as reductions in working memory capacity, reduced processing speed, and impaired inhibition. The four classes of hypotheses considered are that age-related decrements in memory are attributable to (1) failures of strategic processing, (2) deficits in semantic processing, (3) problems in the utilization of context, and (4) changes in basic mechanisms underlying all aspects of cognition. Processing-resource approaches are appealing because they seek to identify deficits in basic mechanisms underlying not only memory but also other aspects of cognition. The findings relevant to the hypotheses that memory changes in old age are due to reduced attentional capacity, smaller working-memory capacity, defective inhibitory processing, or general slowing have been reviewed.

Recollection and familiarity in recognition memory: adult age differences and neuropsychological test correlates.

Dual process theories account for age-related changes in memory by proposing that old age is associated with deficits in recollection together with invariance in familiarity. The authors evaluated this proposal in recognition by examining recollection and familiarity estimates in young and older adults across 3 process estimation methods: inclusion/exclusion, remember/know, and receiver operating characteristics (ROC). Consistent with a previous literature review (Light, Prull, LaVoie, & Healy, 2000), the authors found age invariance in familiarity when process estimates were derived from the inclusion/exclusion method, but the authors found age differences favoring the young when familiarity estimates were derived from the remember/know and ROC methods. Recollection estimates were lower for older adults in all 3 methods. Recollection and familiarity had variable relationships with frontal- and temporal-lobe measures of neuropsychological functioning in older adults, depending on which method was used to generate process estimates. These data suggest that although recollection deficits appear to be the rule in aging, not all estimates of familiarity show age invariance.

Effects of repetition and response deadline on associative recognition in young and older adults

The present study examined the joint effects of repetition and response deadline on associative recognition in older adults. Young and older adults studied lists of unrelated word pairs, half presented once (weak pairs) and half presented four times (strong pairs). Test lists contained old (intact) pairs, pairs consisting of old words that had been studied with other partners (rearranged lures), and unstudied pairs (new lures), and participants were asked to respond “old” only to intact pairs. In Experiment 1, participants were tested with both short and long deadlines. In Experiment 2, the tests were unpaced. In both experiments, repetition increased hit rates for young and older adults. Young adults tested with a long deadline showed reduced (Experiment 1) or invariant (Experiment 2) false alarms to rearranged lures when word pairs were studied more often. Young adults tested with a short deadline and older adults tested under all conditions had increased false alarm rates for strong rearranged pairs. Implications of these results for theories of associative recognition and cognitive aging are explored.

Why Attractive People are Harder to Remember

People judged as highly attractive are more typical in appearance than people who are judged as less attractive. They are liked better but are harder to recognize because they are more similar to each other. This constellation of results is consistent with current views about the nature of category structure.

Direct and indirect tests of memory for category exemplars in young and older adults.

Young and older adults were compared on direct (cued recall) and indirect (exemplar generation) tests of memory for category members. Because category names served as cues in both tasks, amount of retrieval support was constant across tasks. Although older adults produced fewer category members in cued recall, priming of category exemplars in the generation task did not vary with age. These results suggest that age constancy in priming tasks does not depend on physical similarity between study materials and retrieval cues provided at test and point to the importance of deliberate recollection as a factor in determining the extent of age differences in memory.

Memory for scripts in young and older adults

This study examined the question of whether young and older adults differ in their representation or utilization of the generic knowledge contained in scripts. In Experiment 1, young and older adults generated scripts for routine daily activities, such as grocery shopping, going to the doctor, and writing a letter to a friend. No evidence was found for age-related differences in the way that stereotypical action sequences are represented in semantic memory. In Experiment 2, young adults were found to recall and recognize new instantiations of scripts better than did older adults. However, adults in both age groups displayed similar effects of action typicality on retention, suggesting that there are no age-related differences in drawing inferences from generic knowledge. The implications of these findings for processing-resource hypotheses about memory and aging are discussed.