Adult Age Differences in Self-Regulated Learning From Reading Sentences.

We examined age differences in the heuristic used to allocate effort in learning information from sentences. Younger and older adults read and reread sentences varying in propositional density for recall, making judgments of learning before producing recall. The allocation of effort in rereading items that were less well learned on the first reading was optimized for sentences of intermediate complexity, especially for older adults. These data support a model of self-regulated learning in which readers reduce the discrepancy between current and optimal states of learning. However, self-regulation, which may be procedure based or rely on an implicit representation of the current state of learning, may be particularly efficient for older adults within a region of proximal learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The associative-memory basis of cognitive skill learning: Adult age differences.

It has been established that memorizing common problems and their solutions underlies cognitive skill development, and that there are substantial age deficits in the rate of this learning. In a between-groups design, the authors compared learning rates for the same set of problems in skill (SK) training and paired-associate (PA) training. The authors found main effects due to condition (PA problems were acquired earlier) and to age (older adults' learning was delayed), but no condition-by-age interaction. The authors concluded that the age deficit in SK can be accounted for by the age deficit in associative memory; no further explanation is needed. The authors also analyzed fast and slow retrieves in SK and PA, and found that the frequency of fast retrieves did not differ in the two conditions. The overall advantage of PA was due to the occurrence of slow retrieves, which were absent in SK presumably because the skill algorithm displaces slow, explicit memory search in SK, but not fast, familiarity-based retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in temporal and item memory.

Three experiments tested whether the relationship between age differences in temporal and item memory depends on the degree to which the item memory measure relies on memory for context. The authors predicted a stronger relationship of temporal memory to free recall than to recognition memory. Results showed that age differences in temporal memory could be eliminated after controlling for free recall but not recognition memory performance. Under some conditions recognition memory accounted for a significant portion of age-related variance in temporal memory. These results challenge past research that has interpreted age differences in temporal and item memory as independent and suggest that a generalized decline in context memory may underlie reduced performance in older adults on all types of memory tests. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in the perceptual span during reading.

Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N + 2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N + 2 or word N + 2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N + 1 was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N + 2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N + 2 preview both for young and for old adults, with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N + 1. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interference effects from grammatically unavailable constituents during sentence processing.

Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic interference occur in the earliest online measures in the region where the retrieval of a long-distance dependent occurs. Semantic interference effects occur in later online measures at the end of the sentence. Both effects endure in offline comprehension measures, suggesting that interfering items participate in incorrect interpretations that resist reanalysis. The data are discussed in terms of a cue-based retrieval account of parsing, which reconciles the fact that the parser must violate the grammar in order for these interference effects to occur. Broader implications of this research indicate a need for a precise specification of the interface between the parsing mechanism and the memory system that supports language comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in episodic memory: Further support for an associative-deficit hypothesis.

This study further tested an associative-deficit hypothesis (ADH; M. Naveh-Benjamin, 2000), which attributes a substantial part of older adults' deficient episodic memory performance to their difficulty in merging unrelated attributes-units of an episode into a cohesive unit. First, the results of 2 experiments replicate those observed by M. Naveh-Benjamin (2000) showing that older adults are particularly deficient in memory tests requiring associations. Second, the results extend the type of stimuli (pictures) under which older adults show this associative deficit. Third, the results support an ADH in that older adults show less of an associative deficit when the components of the episodes used are already connected in memory, thereby facilitating their encoding and retrieval. Finally, a group of younger adults who encoded the information under divided-attention conditions did not show this associative deficit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In search of on-line locality effects in sentence comprehension.

Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such locality effects are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties and limitations of the short-term memory system that supports comprehension. Despite their theoretical importance and putative ubiquity, however, evidence for on-line locality effects is quite narrow linguistically and methodologically: It is restricted almost exclusively to self-paced reading of complex structures involving a particular class of syntactic relation. We present 4 experiments (2 self-paced reading and 2 eyetracking experiments) that demonstrate locality effects in the course of establishing subject–verb dependencies; locality effects are seen even in materials that can be read quickly and easily. These locality effects are observable in the earliest possible eye-movement measures and are of much shorter duration than previously reported effects. To account for the observed empirical patterns, we outline a processing model of the adaptive control of button pressing and eye movements. This model makes progress toward the goal of eliminating linking assumptions between memory constructs and empirical measures in favor of explicit theories of the coordinated control of motor responses and parsing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and self-regulated language processing.

An adult developmental model of self-regulated language processing (SRLP) is introduced, in which the allocation policy with which a reader engages text is driven by declines in processing capacity, growth in knowledge-based processes, and age-related shifts in reading goals. Evidence is presented to show that the individual reader's allocation policy is consistent across time and across different types of text, can serve a compensatory function in relation to abilities, and is predictive of subsequent memory performance. As such, it is an important facet of language understanding and learning from text through the adult life span. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in autobiographical reasoning in narratives.

Two studies examined age differences in autobiographical reasoning within narratives about personal experiences. In Study 1 (n=63), people completed brief interviews about turning points and crises in their lives. Older participants were more likely to narrate crises in ways that connected the experience to the speaker's sense of self, that is, to show autobiographical reasoning. This increase was primarily evident in young adulthood and midlife. In Study 2 (n=115), adults provided written narratives about heterogeneous autobiographical experiences. Age was associated with linear increases in the likelihood of autobiographical reasoning. The results are discussed in terms of narrative approaches to self-development across the life span. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of emotional valence on age differences in early processing and memory.

This study examined older and younger adults' attentional biases and subsequent incidental recognition memory for distracting positive, negative, and neutral words. Younger adults were more distracted by negative stimuli than by positive or neutral stimuli, and they correctly recognized more negative than positive words. Older adults, however, attended equally to all stimuli yet showed reliable recognition only for positive words. Thus, although an attentional bias toward negative words carried over into recognition performance for younger adults, older adults' bias appeared to be limited to remembering positive information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in event-based prospective memory: A meta-analysis on the role of focal versus nonfocal cues.

Studies of age differences in event-based prospective memory indicate wide variation in the magnitude of age effects. One explanation derived from the multiprocess framework proposes that age differences depend on whether the cue to carry out a prospective intention is focal to ongoing task processing. A meta-analysis of 117 effect sizes from 4,709 participants provided evidence for this view, as age effects were greater when the prospective cue to the ongoing task was nonfocal compared with when it was focal. However, the results only support a weaker but not a stronger prediction of the multiprocess framework, as age impairments were reliably above zero for both types of retrieval cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of age on contextually mediated associations in paired associate learning.

Older and young adults learned single-function lists of paired associates with no contextual overlap (e.g., J-K, L-M) and double-function lists of paired associates consisting of chains of pairs (e.g., A-B, B-C). Although young adults outperformed older adults on both pair types, there was a robust Pair Type × Age interaction. Evidence from intrusion analyses shows that older adults performed better than would be expected on the contextually overlapping double-function pairs because they were less subject to response competition for the double-function pairs. Young adults made a larger proportion of backward and remote intrusions to double-function probes than did older adults. Thus, group differences in both correct-recall probabilities and intrusion analysis suggest that backward and transitive associations are sensitive to aging. The results are discussed within the theoretical framework of the temporal context model and the hypothesis that older adults are impaired at forming new item-context associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult Age Differences in Knowledge-Driven Reading.

The authors investigated the effects of domain knowledge on online reading among younger and older adults. Individuals were randomly assigned to either a domain-relevant (i.e., high-knowledge) or domain-irrelevant (i.e., low-knowledge) training condition. Two days later, participants read target passages on a computer that drew on information presented in the high-knowledge training session. For both age groups, knowledge improved comprehension and recall and facilitated the processing of topic shifts during reading. In addition, domain knowledge had differential effects on processing across the 2 age groups. Among older (but not younger) readers, domain knowledge increased the time allocated to organization and integration processes (wrap-up) and increased the frequency of knowledge-based inferences during recall. These results suggest that among older readers, domain knowledge engenders an investment of processing resources during reading, which is used to create a more elaborated representation of the situation model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anticipation interval and age differences in verbal learning.

Age differences were demonstrated to be greater at the shorter anticipation interval than at the longer in 2 paired-associate studies. Earlier work had suggested that this age-pace interaction was not a true learning effect but a performance deficit due to the difficulty the older person has in responding rapidly. The 2nd study provided evidence that relatively few of the errors made by the old Ss at the fast pace could be attributed to insufficient time to emit a learned response. Even when Ss were permitted to take as much time as needed to respond, the age-pace interaction was found. Several possible explanations for such a learning deficit were noted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Explaining age differences in temporal working memory.

To determine the cognitive mechanisms underlying age differences in temporal working memory (WM), the authors examined the contributions of item memory, associative memory, simple order memory, and multiple item memory, using parallel versions of the delayed-matching-to-sample task. Older adults performed more poorly than younger adults on tests of temporal memory, but there were no age differences in nonassociative item memory, regardless of the amount of information to be learned. In contrast, a combination of associative and simple order memory, both of which were reduced in older adults, completely accounted for age-related declines in temporal memory. The authors conclude that 2 mechanisms may underlie age differences in temporal WM, namely, a generalized decline in associative ability and a specific difficulty with order information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective adult age differences in an age-invariant multifactor model of declarative memory.

Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test competing models of declarative memory. Data from middle-aged participants provided support for a model comprised of 2 2nd-order (episodic and semantic memory) and 4 1st-order (recall, recognition, fluency, and knowledge) factors. Extending this model across young-old and old-old participants established support for age invariance. Tests of group differences showed an age deficit in episodic memory that was more pronounced for recall than for recognition. For semantic memory, there was an increase in knowledge from middle to young-old age and thereafter a decrease. Overall, the results support the view that episodic memory is more age sensitive than semantic memory, but they also indicate that aging has differential effects within these 2 forms of memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in storage-retrieval processes: A stages-of-learning analysis of developmental interactions in concreteness effects.

In standard list-learning experiments, Age × Treatment interactions have been regarded as an important source of information regarding the locus (storage/retrieval) of age-related memory deficits in adulthood. Unfortunately, these interactions may be spurious byproducts of the use of fixed-trials designs in which age and completeness of learning are confounded. In this paper, we report two experiments in which these problems were explored in the context of item concreteness effects in young and old adults' free recall. In each experiment, eighty 20-year-olds and forty-two 70-year-olds memorized a 16-item list to a stringent acquisition criterion. The manipulations were pictures versus words (Exp. 1) and concrete versus abstract nouns (Exp. 2). The data were analyzed using a recently developed two-stage model that delivers numerical estimates of the impact of these manipulations on the storage and retrieval components of recall. For Experiment 1, the results showed that: (a) for young adults, pictures were easier to store and retrieve than words; (b) for old adults, there was a pictorial superiority effect at storage but a marked pictorial inferiority effect at retrieval; and (c) although younger adults were better than older adults at storing pictures and words and at retrieving pictures, older adults were better than younger adults at retrieving words. For Experiment 2, the results showed that: (a) on average, concrete words were easier to store and retrieve than abstract words at both age levels; and (b) on average, although younger adults were better than older adults at storing concrete and abstract words and at retrieving abstract words, older adults were better than younger adults at retrieving concrete words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Information processing speed and sentence comprehension in Parkinson's disease.

This study tests the hypothesis that sentence comprehension difficulty in Parkinson's disease (PD) is related in part to altered information processing speed that plays a crucial role in grammatical processing. The authors measured information processing speed in 32 PD patients without dementia using a lexical list-priming paradigm in which the interstimulus interval (ISI) between the prime and the target varied. Sentence comprehension accuracy was also assessed in 22 of these patients. Sentence comprehension accuracy for object-relative center-embedded sentences was impaired in a subgroup of PD patients. This subgroup of PD patients primed at an abnormally long ISI. Similarly, only PD patients who primed at a long ISI had greater difficulty understanding sentences with an object-relative clause than a subject-relative clause. Findings suggest that slowed information processing speed contributes to sentence comprehension difficulty in PD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in verbal learning.

"An old and a young group of Ss, mean ages 78.1 and 26.8 years, were given 3 paired-associate learning tasks which differed in the degree to which prior experience might be expected to facilitate or block present learning. They consisted of: (a) Familiar word pairs, (b) nonsense equations, and (c) false equations. Both groups performed best on the word-associate task, but there was little difference between the learning of nonsense and false equations within either group. On all 3 procedures the old group was significantly poorer, but they were proportionately more deficient in the learning of materials in which the facilitative effects of prior experience are minimized, i.e., the 2 forms of equations. However, they had no greater difficulty with the interference than with the nonsense material." 16 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Response bias in "remembering" emotional stimuli: A new perspective on age differences.

Older adults sometimes show a recall advantage for emotionally positive, rather than neutral or negative, stimuli (S. T. Charles, M. Mather, & L. L. Carstensen, 2003). In contrast, younger adults respond "old" and "remember" more often to negative materials in recognition tests. For younger adults, both effects are due to response bias changes rather than to enhanced memory accuracy (S. Dougal & C. M. Rotello, 2007). We presented older and younger adults with emotional and neutral stimuli in a remember-know paradigm. Signal-detection and model-based analyses showed that memory accuracy did not differ for the neutral, negative, and positive stimuli, and that "remember" responses did not reflect the use of recollection. However, both age groups showed large and significant response bias effects of emotion: Younger adults tended to say "old" and "remember" more often in response to negative words than to positive and neutral words, whereas older adults responded "old" and "remember" more often to both positive and negative words than to neutral stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)