Perceptual specificity and implicit auditory priming in older and younger adults.

Age differences in perceptual specificity for implicit auditory priming were examined in 3 experiments. All 3 experiments began with a study phase during which participants rated words based on perceptual (shallow encoding) or semantic (deep encoding) attributes. After the study phase, participants were asked to identify filtered versions of repeated and new words (implicit test) and then to make old/new recognition judgments (explicit test). In contrast to earlier findings (D. L. Schacter, B. Church, & D. M. Osowiecki, 1994), older and younger adults were equally sensitive to study-to-test changes in speaking rate (Experiment 1), fundamental frequency (Experiment 2), and voice (Experiment 3). Explicit memory, in contrast, was significantly poorer for older adults but was minimally affected by changes in surface features. Findings from the study are discussed with respect to their implications for establishing the mechanisms mediating perceptual specificity and for their importance in understanding age-related changes in implicit memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Further evidence that negative priming in the Stroop color–word task is equivalent in older and younger adults.

In 2 experiments, possible adult age differences in negative priming were explored using several variants of the Stroop color-word task. Negative priming was at least as high in the older adults as in the younger adults in every variant. Negative priming varied as a function of condition, but the age equivalence was unaffected. This result was true even when the possibility of general slowing was taken into account. Across conditions, interference and negative priming were positively correlated. The results do not permit a clear choice between the 2 major theoretical explanations of negative priming, inhibition and memory retrieval; they do show that negative priming can be systematically manipulated within an experimental paradigm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Typography manipulations can affect priming of word stem completion in older and younger adults.

The experiments reported here investigated whether changes of typography affected priming of word stem completion performance in older and younger adults. Across all experiments, the typeface in which a word appeared at presentation either did or did not match that of its 3-letter stem at test. In Exp 1, no significant evidence of a typography effect was found when words were presented with a sentence judgment or letter judgment task. However, subsequent experiments revealed that, in both older and younger adults, only words presented with a syllable judgment task gave rise to the typography effect (Exps 2–4). Specifically, perforance was greater when the presentation and test typeface matched than when they did not. Exp 5, which used stem-cued recall, did not reveal a difference between syllable and letter judgment tasks. These findings highlight the complex nature of word stem completion performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Characteristics of associative learning in younger and older adults: Evidence from an episodic priming paradigm.

Two experiments investigated age differences in the encoding of associative information during a speeded naming task. In both experiments, semantically unrelated prime-target word pairs were presented 4 times, in either massed or spaced fashion, during the learning phase. An immediate or delayed test trial was presented following the fourth presentation. In Experiment 1, participants named both the primes and the targets. Younger and older adults showed similar benefits when naming targets that were part of a consistent prime-target pairing compared with targets presented with different primes at each presentation. In Experiment 2, participants named only the target word. Younger adults showed a benefit for consistently paired words, whereas older adults showed no benefit for consistently paired words. The results of the test trials showed a greater benefit for massed repeated words than for spaced repeated words at the immediate test and a reversed pattern at the delayed test. This spacing by test delay interaction was evident in response latency in Experiment 1 and in cued recall performance in Experiment 2. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Written language comprehension in younger and older adults

This study examined the effects of text genre and repeated reading on written language comprehension in younger (M = 21 years) and older (M = 72 years) healthy adults (N = 54). Participants verified four text-based statements (i.e., explicit, implicit, contradictory, and elaborated) after reading expository, narrative, and procedural texts. Verification accuracy was comparable for both age groups; however, text genre, statement-type, and repeated reading produced significant effects. Expository passages, explicit and implicit statements, and repeated reading yielded superior results. Procedural passages and contradictory and elaborated statements yielded less accurate results. Statement-types invoked multiple levels of cognitive representation across text genres and age groups. Overall, reading time was significantly faster for younger adults, and reading times were significantly faster for both age groups during the repeated reading trial. Text genre also influenced reading time, with expository passages read faster than narrative and procedural passages. These findings suggest the appreciable influences of text genre and repeated reading on measures of text processing and comprehension in healthy adults, irrespective of age.     

State-dependent learning in older and younger adults.

In this study state-dependent learning in younger and older adults was compared. State was manipulated by having participants rest or exercise for 5 min, followed by exposure to 3 learning trials of a 20-item word list. After a 20-min delay, participants engaged either in the congruent or in the incongruent activity followed by free-recall trial, cued-recall, and recognition tests. Heart rate, blood pressure, and self-report of distress measures verified that the experimental conditions influenced the participants' physiologic state, but the distracter tasks did not. There was no difference in learning that was due to initial exercise condition, but both age groups showed greater recall when state was congruent before learning and delayed recall. This replicates previous research in which consistent state-dependent learning effects in younger adults were found and supports research suggesting that older adults spontaneously use contextual information to facilitate recall. The demonstration of state-dependent learning in older adults is discussed as an example of implicit memory not affected by aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identity negative priming in older adults and individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type.

This study addressed the question of whether dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) produces a breakdown in aspects of the inhibitory component underlying selective attention. Two measures of identity negative priming and 2 measures of distractor interference were obtained. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with overlapping picture stimuli, and in Experiment 2, participants were presented with overlapping written word stimuli. The results of both experiments produced reliable and similar size negative priming in young and old adults, but there was no evidence of negative priming in the individuals with DAT. In contrast, the naming latencies of all 3 groups showed a reliable and similar size distractor interference effect. These results suggest that although the inhibitory component underlying selective attention is impaired in individuals with DAT, the ability to differentiate a target from a distractor may be preserved under certain task conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attitudes toward older and younger adults: A meta-analysis.

Attitudes toward the elderly have been examined in a number of empirical studies, yet the question of whether the elderly are viewed more negatively than younger persons has not been resolved. A meta-analysis of the literature was conducted to examine this question; results demonstrated that attitudes toward the elderly are more negative than attitudes toward younger people. However, smaller differences between the evaluations of elderly and younger targets were found when (a) the study used measures of personality traits (compared with measures of competence), (b) there were a larger number of dependent measures included in the effect size, (c) specific information was provided about the target person (compared with when a general target such as old person was used), and (d) a between-subjects design (compared with a within-subjects design) was used. These results support Lutsky's (1981) conclusion that age, in and of itself, seems to be less important in determining attitudes toward the elderly than other types of information. The methodological limitations within the literature and a need to consider multiple components of attitudes toward older individuals are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory temporal order perception in younger and older adults

This investigation examined the abilities of younger and older listeners to discriminate and identify temporal order of sounds presented in tonal sequences. It was hypothesized that older listeners would exhibit greater difficulty than younger listeners on both temporal processing tasks, particularly for complex stimulus patterns. It was also anticipated that tone order discrimination would be easier than tone order identification for all listeners. Listeners were younger and older adults with either normal hearing or mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing losses. Stimuli were temporally contiguous three-tone sequences within a 1/3 octave frequency range centered at 4000 Hz. For the discrimination task, listeners discerned differences between standard and comparison stimulus sequences that varied in tonal temporal order. For the identification task, listeners identified tone order of a single sequence using labels of relative pitch. Older listeners performed more poorly than younger listeners on the discrimination task for the more complex pitch patterns and on the identification task for faster stimulus presentation rates. The results also showed that order discrimination is easier than order identification for all listeners. The effects of hearing loss on the ordering tasks were minimal.     

Memory performance awareness in younger and older adults.

Reports on the course of memory-monitoring skills across adulthood are discrepant in conclusions and limited in scope. The purpose of this study was to build a large data base (3 samples and 7 different tasks) to assess performance awareness. Younger (19–41 years) and older (59–93 years) Ss estimated performance either before (i.e., predictions) or after (i.e., postdictions) completing each task. Predictions were less accurate than postdictions at both age levels, suggesting Ss monitored performance during the study–test cycle. Overall, the data suggested no consistent age effects in performance awareness: Age differences in monitoring occurred only in predictions and only for some tasks. Between-tasks differences in age effects could not be attributed to a single mediating mechanism like those suggested in previous reports. Why previous research has produced conflicting conclusions about metacognitive development in adulthood is discussed in light of these data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Illusory recollection in older adults and younger adults under divided attention.

The authors investigated the effect of divided attention, study-list repetition, and age on recollection and familiarity. Older and younger adults under full attention and younger adults under divided attention at study viewed word lists highly associated with a single unstudied word (critical lure) once or three times, and subsequently performed a remember-know recognition test. Younger adults made fewer false remember responses to critical lures from repeated study lists, whereas younger adults under divided attention and older adults both showed an increase with repetition. Findings suggest older adults' susceptibility to illusory memories is related to a deficit in available attention during encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory suppression and frequency selectivity in older and younger adults

Age differences in auditory suppression were examined by comparing auditory-filter shapes obtained with simultaneous and forward masking at 2 kHz in young and elderly normal-hearing listeners. To compensate for the decay of forward masking, growth of masking functions were used to transform thresholds obtained with a notched-noise masker to the level of a continuous noise band that would give the same threshold values. Although both age groups exhibited smaller equivalent rectangular bandwidths (ERBs) when the filters derived from transformed thresholds were obtained with forward masking, the change from simultaneous to nonsimultaneous masking was significantly greater for young adults. Measures of the low- (Pl) and high- (Pu) frequency sides of the filters for young listeners indicated that the slopes of both sides increased following a change from simultaneous to forward masking but that the high-frequency side exhibited significantly greater sharpening. Filter slopes (both upper and lower) for older adults, in contrast, did not differ between the two masking procedures. The findings from the study are discussed as reflecting possible age differences in auditory suppression. However, it is also noted that conclusions regarding differences between filter shapes derived with simultaneous and forward masking are limited to filter parameters determined with transformed (as described above) thresholds.     

Effects of positive and negative social exchanges with various sources on depressive symptoms in younger and older adults

Addressing a previous gap in the gerontological literature, the present study examined the effects of both positive and negative social exchanges within key relationships (spouse, children, and other relatives/friends) on the depressive symptoms of younger (28 to 59 years old) and older (60 to 92 years old) men and women. Separate analyses were carried out on younger adults (N = 452) and older adults (N = 849) who were respondents in the Americans' Changing Lives study. In both age groups, positive and negative social exchanges with the same source were significantly (p < .001), inversely related (rs range from -.23 to -.43); and positive social exchanges exerted stronger net effects on depressive symptoms than negative social exchanges. For older adults, some buffering effects were found when negative and positive social exchanges were associated with different sources; for younger adults, buffering effects were found when negative and positive social exchanges were associated with the same source. These buffering effects were not conditioned by gender. The findings of the present study highlight the importance of taking into account the age of the recipient and the provider-recipient relationship when studying the joint influence of negative and positive social exchanges on adults' depressive symptoms.     

Adaptation to visuomotor rotations in younger and older adults.

Adaptation to a visuomotor rotation is known to be impaired at older adult age. The authors examined whether the impairment is present already at preretirement age and whether it depends on the difficulty of the adaptation task. Moreover, the authors tested predictions of the hypothesis that the age-related impairment pertains primarily to strategic corrections and the explicit knowledge on which they are based but not to the acquisition of an (implicit) internal model of the novel visuomotor transformation. The authors found an age-related impairment of adaptation and explicit knowledge already at preretirement age but no age-related change of aftereffects. With an incremental simplification of the adaptation task, age-related changes were able to be eliminated. Individual differences of the quality of explicit knowledge were associated with differences of adaptation, but not of aftereffects. When age groups were matched by explicit knowledge, age-related impairments of adaptation largely disappeared. However, a reliable difference remained in one of the experiments, suggesting that other processes of adjustment to a visuomotor rotation might be affected by aging as well. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context affects feeling-of-knowing accuracy in younger and older adults.

In feeling of knowing (FOK) studies, participants predict subsequent recognition memory performance on items that were initially encoded but that cannot presently be recalled. Research suggests that FOK judgment magnitude may be influenced by the total amount, or quantity, of contextual information retrieved related to the unrecalled target (e.g., Koriat, 1993). The present study examined the contribution of quality of that information to episodic FOK judgments. In addition, we tested whether the episodic FOK deficit demonstrated by older adults could be reduced by encouraging retrieval of contextual information relevant to the target. Three experiments demonstrated that quality of the retrieved partial information influenced FOK judgments in both older and younger adults; however, the manifestation of that influence was age dependent. The results also indicated that older adults required explicit retrieval of contextual information before making FOK judgments in order to make accurate FOK predictions. The results suggest that FOK accuracy may be partially determined by search processes triggered when participants are queried for contextual information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Monitoring one's own forgetting in younger and older adults.

The present study examined whether there are age-related differences in the ability to accurately monitor forgetting. Young and older adults studied a mixed list of categorized words, and later recalled items when cued with each category. They then estimated the number of additional items that they did not recall—a form of monitoring one's forgetting. Older adults exhibited impaired memory performance compared with young adults, but also accurately estimated they forgot more information than young adults. Both age groups were fairly accurate in predicting forgetting in terms of resolution, indicating that aging does not impair the ability to monitor forgetting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Factors influencing word naming in younger and older adults.

The present study examined age differences in the influence of 3 factors that previous research has shown to influence word-naming performance. The influence of word frequency, orthographic length, and orthographic neighborhood measures was examined using large-scale regression analyses on the naming latencies for 2,820 words. Thirty-one younger adults and 29 older adults named all of these words, and age differences in the influence of these factors were examined. The results revealed that all 3 factors predicted reliable amounts of variance in word-naming latencies for both groups. However, older adults showed a larger influence of word frequency and reduced influences of orthographic length and orthographic neighborhood density compared with younger adults. Overall, these results suggest that lexical level factors increase in influence in older adults whereas sublexical factors decrease in influence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perfectionism as a predictor of positive and negative psychological outcomes: Examining a mediation model in younger and older adults.

The relations between general perfectionistic tendencies as measured by R. 0. Frost, P. Marten, C. Lahart, and R. Rosenblate's (1990) Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS), stress, and psychological outcome were assessed among a sample of younger (M?=?20.00 years;n?=?270) and older adults (M?=?46.99 years; n?=?256). Results of conducting a series of path analyses examining a mediation model indicated that the influence of perfectionism on a measure of positive psychological outcome (viz., life satisfaction) was fully mediated by stress. In contrast, the influence of perfectionism on measures of negative psychological outcome (viz., negative mood and worry) were only partially mediated by stress. These pathanalytic findings were consistent across both age groups. Implications of the present findings for future research and intervention in working with perfectionistic clients are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repetition priming of nonwords in young and older adults.

In 3 experiments, a pronunciation task was used to examine repetition priming of novel nonwords in young and older adults. The contributions of item and associative priming to the total repetition priming effect were assessed. In Experiment 1, age consistency was found in both components of repetition priming after 9 repetitions of nonwords. Experiment 2 established that young and older adults were similar in item and associative priming after as few as 2 repetitions of nonwords. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that associative priming persists for at least 3 min and that it is dissociable from cued recall. The overall pattern of results strongly argues that elaborative processing is not necessary to obtain associative priming in indirect memory tasks and that young and older adults show similar magnitudes of associative priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive skill acquisition and transfer in younger and older adults.

The acquisition of cognitive skills often depends on 1 of (or a combination of) 2 processes, the execution of an algorithm, and the retrieval of problem instances. This study examined the effects of age and repetition of problem instances on the production and verification of solutions to 2 serially presented sets of alphabet arithmetic problems. Analyses of the parameters derived from power-function fits for individuals revealed age differences favoring young adults in improvement span, learning rate, and asymptote. For both age groups, the beneficial effects of repetitions on 1st-set response times were attributable to algorithmic speedup and to the retrieval of instances, whereas improvements in the speed of 2nd-set response times were attributable primarily to item retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)