Converging evidence that visuospatial cognition is more age-sensitive than verbal cognition.

In 3 separate experiments, the same samples of young and older adults were tested on verbal and visuospatial processing speed tasks, verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks, and verbal and visuospatial paired-associates learning tasks. In Experiment 1, older adults were generally slower than young adults on all speeded tasks, but age-related slowing was much more pronounced on visuospatial tasks than on verbal tasks. In Experiment 2, older adults showed smaller memory spans than young adults in general, but memory for locations showed a greater age difference than memory for letters. In Experiment 3, older adults had greater difficulty learning novel information than young adults overall, but older adults showed greater deficits learning visuospatial than verbal information. Taken together, the differential deficits observed on both speeded and unspeeded tasks strongly suggest that visuospatial cognition is generally more affected by aging than verbal cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in reading with distraction: Sensory or inhibitory deficits?

Two experiments examined how sensory acuity affects age differences in susceptibility to interference in the reading-with-distraction task. In both experiments, older and younger adults read texts in an italic font and were required to ignore distractor words in an upright font. Experiment 1 examined whether the age-related increase in distractibility can be simulated in younger adults by reducing their visual acuity. Experiment 2 investigated whether the age differences in distractibility disappear if visual acuity is equated across all participants in both age groups. Both experiments showed that an impairment in visual acuity leads to increased interference in the reading-with-distraction task. However, older adults were much more impaired by the distractor material than younger adults with reduced visual acuity (Experiment 1). The age differences in the reading-with-distraction task persisted when visual acuity was equated between older and younger adults (Experiment 2). We conclude that the age-related increase in susceptibility to interference in the reading-with-distraction task is not solely due to perceptual deficits of older adults but arises from a deficit in higher cognitive processes such as inhibitory attention. Nevertheless, sensory acuity has to be taken into account as a potential confounding factor in perceptually demanding visual attention tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of attention on age-related relational memory deficits: Evidence from a novel attentional manipulation.

Healthy aging is often accompanied by episodic memory decline. Prior studies have consistently demonstrated that older adults show disproportionate deficits in relational memory (RM) relative to item memory (IM). Despite rich evidence of an age-related RM deficit, the source of this deficit remains unspecified. One of the most widely investigated factors of age-related RM impairment is a reduction in attentional resources. However, no prior studies have demonstrated that reduced attentional resources are the critical source of age-related RM deficits. Here, we used qualitatively different attention tasks and tested whether reduced attention for relational processing underlies the RM deficit observed in aging. In Experiment 1, we imposed either item-detection or relation-detection attention tasks on young adults during episodic memory encoding and found that only the concurrent attention task that involves relational processing disproportionately impaired RM performance in young adults. Moreover, by ruling out the possible confound of task difficulty on the disproportionate RM impairment, we further demonstrated that reduced relational attention is a key factor for the age-related RM deficit. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results from Experiment 1 by using different materials of stimuli and found that the effect of relational attention on RM is material general. The results of Experiment 2 also showed that reducing attentional resources for relational processing in young adults strikingly equated their RM performance to that of older adults. Thus, this study documents the first evidence that reduced attentional resources for relational processing are a critical factor for the relational memory impairment observed in aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Oh, honey, I already forgot that: Strategic control of directed forgetting in older and younger adults.

Two experiments investigated list-method directed forgetting with older and younger adults. Using standard directed forgetting instructions, significant forgetting was obtained with younger but not older adults. However, in Experiment 1 older adults showed forgetting with an experimenter-provided strategy that induced a mental context change--specifically, engaging in diversionary thought. Experiment 2 showed that age-related differences in directed forgetting occurred because older adults were less likely than younger adults to initiate a strategy to attempt to forget. When the instructions were revised to downplay their concerns about memory, older adults engaged in effective forgetting strategies and showed significant directed forgetting comparable in magnitude to younger adults. The results highlight the importance of strategic processes in directed forgetting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguishing Age Differences in Knowledge, Strategy Use, and Confidence During Strategic Skill Acquisition.

The authors examined how age differences in strategy selection are related to associative learning deficits and metacognitive variables, including memory ability confidence. In Experiment 1, increases in memory reliance for performance of the noun-pair lookup task were compared with increases in noun-pair memory ability. In Experiment 2, memory reliance was assessed for noun pairs memorized prior to the task. In each experiment, older adults manifested a substantial delay in transition to a retrieval-based strategy despite comparable noun-pair knowledge. In Experiment 3, young and older adults reported comparable confidence ratings for the accuracy of each memory probe response. However, older adults reported lower confidence in their general ability to use the memory retrieval strategy, which correlated with avoidance of the retrieval strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of talker familiarity on spoken word identification in younger and older listeners.

The present study was designed to examine age differences in the ability to use voice information acquired intentionally (Experiment 1) or incidentally (Experiment 2) as an aid to spoken word identification. Following both implicit and explicit voice learning, participants were asked to identify novel words spoken either by familiar talkers (ones they had been exposed to in the training phase) or by 4 unfamiliar voices. In both experiments, explicit memory for talkers' voices was significantly lower in older than in young listeners. Despite this age-related decline in voice recognition, however, older adults exhibited equivalent, and in some cases greater, benefit than young listeners from having words spoken by familiar talkers. Implications of the findings for age-related changes in explicit versus implicit memory systems are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is the dissociability of working memory systems for name identity, visual-object identity, and spatial location maintained in old age?

The dissociability of working memory for name identity (verbal information), visual objects, and spatial location was explored in 3 experiments. Consistent with previous results, the 3 working memory systems were dissociable in younger adults. Both younger and older adults showed involvement of name identity in an object identity task, and older adults showed this involvement in a spatial memory task. Results were interpreted as showing that the systems are generally separable but that involvement of 1 with another is possible and more likely in older adults. A 4th, correlational study showed that there is generalized decline in working memory systems in old age, with the age differences in memory mediated to a moderate extent by age-related differences in speed of processing. It was speculated that the specific, possibly strategic changes are independent of and take place against a backdrop of generalized loss of nervous system integrity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The structural organization of the mental lexicon and its contribution to age-related declines in spoken-word recognition.

Three experiments were conducted within the framework of the Neighborhood Activation Model of spoken-word recognition to study how the structural organization of the mental lexicon may contribute to age-related declines in spoken-language processing. Experiment 1 showed that the number and frequency of words that are phonetically similar to a target word had differential effects on perceptual identification in older and younger adults, with older adults being particularly disadvantaged in identifying hard words (words phonetically similar to many other high-frequency words). Experiment 2 showed that age-related deficits in the ability to identify hard words remained under conditions in which performance for a set of easy words (items phonetically similar to relatively few other low-frequency words) was the same for older and younger adults. In Experiment 3, reducing the resources available for identification by changing from single to multiple talkers reduced word recognition more among older than younger adults. Diminished cognitive resources, impaired inhibitory control, and increased general slowing are discussed as explanations for the results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Can Practice Overcome Age-Related Differences in the Psychological Refractory Period Effect?

Can dual-task practice remove age-related differences in the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect? To answer this question, younger and older individuals practiced 7 blocks of a PRP design, in which Task 1 (T1) required a vocal response to an auditory stimulus and Task 2 (T2) required a manual response to a visual stimulus (Experiment 1). The results showed that practice did not reduce, but rather increased, age-related differences in PRP interference. Using the trained individuals, the introduction of a less complex new T1 (Experiment 2) or a less complex new T2 (Experiment 3) with the task previously practiced reduced the PRP interference but only in older adults. The authors propose that older adults suffer from a large task-switch cost that is more sensitive to task complexity than to the amount of practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biased recognition of positive faces in aging and amnestic mild cognitive impairment.

We investigated age differences in biased recognition of happy, neutral, or angry faces in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 revealed increased true and false recognition for happy faces in older adults, which persisted even when changing each face’s emotional expression from study to test in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, we examined the influence of reduced memory capacity on the positivity-induced recognition bias, which showed the absence of emotion-induced memory enhancement but a preserved recognition bias for positive faces in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment compared with older adults with normal memory performance. In Experiment 4, we used semantic differentials to measure the connotations of happy and angry faces. Younger and older participants regarded happy faces as more familiar than angry faces, but the older group showed a larger recognition bias for happy faces. This finding indicates that older adults use a gist-based memory strategy based on a semantic association between positive emotion and familiarity. Moreover, older adults’ judgments of valence were more positive for both angry and happy faces, supporting the hypothesis of socioemotional selectivity. We propose that the positivity-induced recognition bias might be based on fluency, which in turn is based on both positivity-oriented emotional goals and on preexisting semantic associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An opposition procedure for detecting age-related deficits in recollection: Telling effects of repetition.

In 2 experiments, the advantages of placing automatic and consciously controlled memory processes in opposition to study age-related declines in memory performance were examined. Drawing on the common memory failure of mistakenly repeating oneself, a task was designed in which participants had to rely on conscious memory (recollection) to avoid repetition errors. Recollection proved to be severely affected by aging; older adults showed significantly more repetition errors than did younger adults, even at very short retention intervals. These results contrast sharply with the small age differences found with a standard recognition test. Moreover, L. L. Jacoby's (1991) process-dissociation procedure (Experiment 2) showed that automatic memory processes were unaffected with age and could support recognition performance in older adults. The advantages of the opposition procedure for studying memory in older adults relative to other measures are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and integration of contingency evidence in causal judgment.

Age differences in causal judgment are consistently greater for preventative/negative relationships than for generative/positive relationships. In this study, a feature analytic procedure (Mandel & Lehman, 1998) was used to determine whether this effect might be due to differences in young and older adults’ integration of contingency evidence during causal induction. To reduce the impact of age-related changes in learning/memory, the authors presented contingency evidence for preventative, noncontingent, and generative relationships in summary form; the meaningfulness of causal context was varied to induce participants to integrate greater or lesser amounts of this evidence. Young adults showed greater flexibility in their integration processes than did older adults. In an abstract causal context, there were no age differences in causal judgment or integration, but in meaningful contexts, young adults’ judgments for preventative relationships were more accurate than older adults’ and young adults assigned more weight to the contingency evidence confirming these relationships. These differences were mediated by age-related changes in processing speed. The decline in this basic cognitive resource may place boundaries on the amount or type of evidence that older adults can integrate for causal judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Destination memory impairment in older people.

Older adults are assumed to have poor destination memory—knowing to whom they tell particular information—and anecdotes about them repeating stories to the same people are cited as informal evidence for this claim. Experiment 1 assessed young and older adults' destination memory by having participants tell facts (e.g., “A dime has 118 ridges around its edge”) to pictures of famous people (e.g., Oprah Winfrey). Surprise recognition memory tests, which also assessed confidence, revealed that older adults, compared to young adults, were disproportionately impaired on destination memory relative to spared memory for the individual components (i.e., facts, faces) of the episode. Older adults also were more confident that they had not told a fact to a particular person when they actually had (i.e., a miss); this presumably causes them to repeat information more often than young adults. When the direction of information transfer was reversed in Experiment 2, such that the famous people shared information with the participants (i.e., a source memory experiment), age-related memory differences disappeared. In contrast to the destination memory experiment, older adults in the source memory experiment were more confident than young adults that someone had shared a fact with them when a different person actually had shared the fact (i.e., a false alarm). Overall, accuracy and confidence jointly influence age-related changes to destination memory, a fundamental component of successful communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition memory measures yield disproportionate effects of aging on learning face-name associations.

No previous research has tested whether the specific age-related deficit in learning face-name associations that has been identified using recall tasks also occurs for recognition memory measures. Young and older participants saw pictures of unfamiliar people with a name and an occupation for each person, and were tested on a matching (in Experiment 1) or multiple-choice (in Experiment 2) recognition memory test. For both recognition measures, the pattern of effects was the same as that obtained using a recall measure: More face-occupation associations were remembered than face-name associations, young adults remembered more associated information than older adults overall, and older adults had disproportionately poorer memory for face-name associations. Findings implicate age-related difficulty in forming and retrieving the association between the face and the name as the primary cause of obtained deficits in previous name learning studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related differences in recognition memory: Effects of materials and context change.

The study explored age-related differences in the effects of context change on recognition memory by presenting object names (Expt. 1A) or their pictures (Expt. 1B) on background scenes. Participants later attempted to recognize previously presented items on background scenes that were original, switched, blank, or new. Older adults recognized fewer word stimuli than did younger adults, and context effects were larger for older adults. With pictures, however, the age-related decrement was eliminated and context effects were reduced. The beneficial effect of context reinstatement in older adults occurs despite the finding that they are less able to recall or recognize such contexts (Experiment 2). Older adults can use context information in recognition memory at least as efficiently as younger adults when suitable materials and conditions are provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Goal-directed memory: The role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory.

The present study revealed that older adults recruit cognitive control processes to strengthen positive and diminish negative information in memory. In Experiment 1, older adults engaged in more elaborative processing when retrieving positive memories than they did when retrieving negative memories. In Experiment 2, older adults who did well on tasks involving cognitive control were more likely than those doing poorly to favor positive pictures in memory. In Experiment 3, older adults who were distracted during memory encoding no longer favored positive over negative pictures in their later recall, revealing that older adults use cognitive resources to implement emotional goals during encoding. In contrast, younger adults showed no signs of using cognitive control to make their memories more positive, indicating that, for them, emotion regulation goals are not chronically activated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Regaining lost time: Adult aging and the effect of time restoration on recall of time-compressed speech.

Two experiments in which time was restored to artificially accelerated (time-compressed) speech are reported. Experiment I showed that although both young and older adults' recall of the speech benefited from the restoration of time, time restoration failed to boost the older adults to their baseline levels for unaltered speech. In Experiment 2, either 100% or 125% of lost time was restored by inserting pauses, either at linguistic boundaries or at random points within the passages. Experiment 2 showed that the beneficial effects of time restoration depended on where processing time was inserted, as well as how much time was restored. Results are interpreted in terms of age-related slowing in speech processing moderated by preserved linguistic knowledge and short-term conceptual memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Priming of familiar and unfamiliar visual objects over delays in young and older adults.

Although priming of familiar stimuli is usually age invariant, little is known about how aging affects priming of preexperimentally unfamiliar stimuli. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of aging and encoding-to-test delays (0 min, 20 min, 90 min, and 1 week) on priming of unfamiliar objects in block-based priming paradigms. During the encoding phase, participants viewed pictures of novel objects (Experiments 1 and 2) or novel and familiar objects (Experiment 3) and judged their left–right orientation. In the test block, priming was measured using the possible–impossible object-decision test (Experiment 1), symmetric–asymmetric object-decision test (Experiment 2), and real–nonreal object-decision test (Experiment 3). In Experiments 1 and 2, young adults showed priming for unfamiliar objects at all delays, whereas older adults whose baseline task performance was similar to that of young adults did not show any priming. Experiment 3 found no effects of age or delay on priming of familiar objects; however, priming of unfamiliar objects was only observed in the young participants. This suggests that when older adults cannot rely on preexisting memory representations, age-related deficits in priming can emerge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Separating habit and recollection in young and older adults: Effects of elaborative processing and distinctiveness.

An extension of L. L. Jacoby's (1991) process-dissociation procedure was used to examine the effects of aging on recollection and automatic influences of memory (habit). Experiment 1 showed that older adults were impaired in their ability to engage in recollection but did not differ from young adults in their reliance on habit. Elderly adults were also less able to exploit distinctive contextual information to enhance recollection. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that with more supportive conditions, older adults were able to benefit from distinctive contextual information. Quantitative and qualitative deficits in recollective abilities are interpreted within a dual-process model of memory. The problem of distinguishing between a deficit in recollection and a deficit in inhibitory processes in older adults (e. g., L. Hasher & R. T. Zacks, 1998) and the importance of this distinction for purposes of repairing memory performance are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generalization of learning from picture books to novel test conditions by 18- and 24-month-old children.

Researchers know little about whether very young children can recognize objects originally introduced to them in a picture book when they encounter similar looking objects in various real-world contexts. The present studies used an imitation procedure to explore young children's ability to generalize a novel action sequence from a picture book to novel test conditions. The authors found that 18-month-olds imitated the action sequence from a book only when the conditions at testing matched those at encoding; altering the test stimuli or context disrupted imitation (Experiment 1A). In contrast, the 24-month-olds imitated the action sequence with changes to both the test context and stimuli (Experiment 1B). Moreover, although the 24-month-olds exhibited deferred imitation with no changes to the test conditions, they did not defer imitation with changes to the context and stimuli (Experiment 2). Two factors may account for the pattern of results: age-related changes in children's ability to utilize novel retrieval cues as well as their emerging ability to understand the representational nature of pictures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)