The relationship between the discourse knowledge and the writing performance of elementary-grade students.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 101(2) of Journal of Educational Psychology (see record 2009-04640-012). The DOI published was incorrect. The correct DOI for this article is provided in the erratum.] This study examined whether discourse knowledge about various forms of writing predicted young developing writers' (Grade 2 and Grade 4 students) story writing performance once 4 writing (handwriting fluency, spelling, attitude toward writing, advanced planning) and 3 nonwriting (grade, gender, basic reading skills) variables were controlled. It also examined whether Grade 4 students (18 boys, 14 girls) possessed more discourse knowledge than Grade 2 students (18 boys, 14 girls). Students wrote a story and responded to a series of questions designed to elicit their declarative and procedural knowledge about the characteristics of good writing in general and stories in particular as well as their knowledge about how to write. Five aspects of this discourse knowledge (substantive, production, motivation, story elements, and irrelevant) together made a unique and significant contribution to the prediction of story quality, length, and vocabulary diversity beyond the 7 control variables. In addition, older students possessed greater knowledge about the role of substantive processes, motivation, and abilities in writing. Findings support the theoretical propositions that discourse knowledge is an important element in early writing development and that such knowledge is an integral part of the knowledge-telling approach to writing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stroop performance in healthy younger and older adults and in individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer's type

Components of the Stroop task were examined to investigate the role that inhibitory processes play in cognitive changes in healthy older adults and in individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). Inhibitory breakdowns should result in an increase in Stroop interference. The results indicate that older adults show a disproportionate increase in interference compared with younger adults. DAT individuals show interference proportionate to older adults but a disproportionate increase in facilitation for congruent color-word trials, and an increased intrusion of word naming on incongruent color naming trials. An ex-Gaussian analysis of response time distributions indicated that the increased interference observed in older adults was due to an increase in the tail of the distribution. Application of the process dissociation analysis of the Stroop task (D.S. Lindsay & L.L. Jacoby, 1994) indicated that older adults showed increased word process estimates, whereas DAT individuals showed differences in both color and word process estimates. Taken together, the results are consistent with an inhibitory breakdown in normal aging and an accelerated breakdown in inhibition in DAT individuals.     

"The relationship between the discourse knowledge and the writing performance of elementary-grade students": Correction to Olinghouse and Graham (2009).

Reports an error in "The relationship between the discourse knowledge and the writing performance of elementary-grade students" by Natalie G. Olinghouse and Steve Graham (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2009[Feb], Vol 101[1], 37-50). The DOI published was incorrect. The correct DOI for this article is provided in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2009-01936-013.) This study examined whether discourse knowledge about various forms of writing predicted young developing writers' (Grade 2 and Grade 4 students) story writing performance once 4 writing (handwriting fluency, spelling, attitude toward writing, advanced planning) and 3 nonwriting (grade, gender, basic reading skills) variables were controlled. It also examined whether Grade 4 students (18 boys, 14 girls) possessed more discourse knowledge than Grade 2 students (18 boys, 14 girls). Students wrote a story and responded to a series of questions designed to elicit their declarative and procedural knowledge about the characteristics of good writing in general and stories in particular as well as their knowledge about how to write. Five aspects of this discourse knowledge (substantive, production, motivation, story elements, and irrelevant) together made a unique and significant contribution to the prediction of story quality, length, and vocabulary diversity beyond the 7 control variables. In addition, older students possessed greater knowledge about the role of substantive processes, motivation, and abilities in writing. Findings support the theoretical propositions that discourse knowledge is an important element in early writing development and that such knowledge is an integral part of the knowledge-telling approach to writing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The utility of intraindividual variability in selective attention tasks as an early marker for Alzheimer’s disease.

This study explored differences in intraindividual variability in 3 attention tasks across a large sample of healthy older adults and individuals with very mild dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT). Three groups of participants (healthy young adults, healthy older adults, very mild DAT) were administered 3 experimental measures of attentional selection and switching (Stroop, Simon, task switching). The results indicated that a measure of intraindividual variability, coefficient of variation (CoV; SD/M), increased across age and early stage DAT. The CoV in Stroop discriminated the performance of ε4 carriers from noncarriers in healthy older controls and the CoV in task switching was correlated with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers predictive of DAT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging, metamemory, and high-confidence errors: A misrecollection account.

Two experiments showed that older adults were worse than younger adults at judging the accuracy of their responses on source identification (i.e., who said what) and cued-recall tests. It is important to note that this age-related metamonitoring impairment occurred even after older and younger adults were matched on overall source accuracy and cued-recall accuracy. By contrast, older and younger adults showed comparable metamonitoring capacities when assessing the likely accuracy of old-new recognition judgments and responses to questions about general knowledge. These experiments are consistent with the misrecollection account of cognitive aging, which suggests that age-related memory impairments are due to older adults' vulnerability to making high-confidence errors when answering questions that require memory for specific details about recently learned events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention and driving performance in Alzheimer's disease

The present study examined the relationship between visual attention measures and driving performance in healthy older adults and individuals with very mild and mild dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT). Subjects were administered an on-road driving assessment and three visual attention tasks (visual search, visual monitoring, and useful field of view). The results indicated that error rate and reaction time during visual search were the best predictors of driving performance. Furthermore, visual search performance was predictive of driving performance above and beyond simple dementia severity and several traditional psychometric tests. The results suggest that general cognitive status may be useful for identifying individuals "at risk" for unsafe driving. However, measures of selective attention may serve to better differentiate safe versus unsafe drivers, especially in the DAT population.     

Vulnerability of Older Adults to Deception in Prison and Nonprison Contexts.

Media reports frequently depict older adults as victims of deception. The public perceives these stories as particularly salient because older adults are seen as fragile victims taken advantage of because of trusting behaviors. This developmental investigation of deception detection examines older and younger adults interacting in 2 contexts, prison and the "free world," to discover whether older adults are vulnerable to deception. Younger prisoners were found to be lie biased. Older adults were better able to discriminate lies than younger adults, and this effect was localized primarily to older female adults. Findings indicate that discriminability strongly increases from younger to older age for women, whereas men do not show an improvement, as age increases, in making decisions about statement veracity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prospective memory and apolipoprotein e in healthy aging and early stage Alzheimer's disease.

The present study examined whether prospective memory performance discriminates healthy aging from very mild dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) and individuals at risk for DAT because of the presence of the apolipoprotein E (ApoE) ε4 allele. Four groups (young subjects, young-old control subjects, old-old control subjects, and subjects with very mild DAT) engaged in an event-based prospective memory task wherein they responded to a specific word embedded in a general knowledge test. Results indicated that prospective memory performance was clearly impaired in the very mild DAT group relative to the healthy older control groups. Moreover, prospective memory performance appears to capture unique variance in discriminating these 2 groups above and beyond standard retrospective memory tests. However, prospective memory was not affected by ApoE status in the young-old control group and, contrary to predictions, the ε4+ old-old control subjects showed better performance than did the ε4- subjects. In contrast to the healthy individuals, in the very mild DAT group, ε4+ subjects showed deficits in performance relative to the ε4- subjects. Discussion focuses on prospective memory as a cognitive indicator of early stage DAT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context Processing and Context Maintenance in Healthy Aging and Early Stage Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type.

Declines in the ability to process context information may represent a fundamental mechanism of age-related cognitive changes. Two components of context processing--activation/updating and maintenance--were examined in a sample of healthy younger and older adults, along with individuals suffering from early stage dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). All older adult groups showed context activation/updating impairments, whereas context maintenance was only impaired in the oldest adults (age>75 years) and was further exacerbated in DAT individuals. The results suggest that context processing may be composed of functionally dissociable components and point to the utility of this construct in understanding the timecourse of cognitive decline in healthy and pathological aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in memory for prose: The question of sensitivity to passage structure.

The hypothesis that older adults remember prose less well than young adults because they are less sensitive to the structure of prose passages was investigated in three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, older adults (aged 54–85) recalled less information than younger ones (aged 20–36) from stories having various structures, but there was no evidence that older people were insensitive to story structure. The pattern of recall of information high and low in the story structure was similar for young and old for each story examined. Experiment 3 extended the findings to recall of full-length essays and their summaries. These results suggest that the old are as sensitive to passage structure as the young. In addition, comparisons across the three experiments suggest that other frequently invoked explanations of age deficits in prose recall, such as individual differences in verbal ability and the nature of the materials used, cannot explain our results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The utility of placing recollection in opposition to familiarity in early discrimination of healthy aging and very mild dementia of the Alzheimer’s type.

This study explored the ability to control familiarity-based information in a memory exclusion paradigm in healthy young, older adults, and early stage DAT individuals. We compared the predictive power of memory exclusion performance to standard psychometric performance in discriminating between aging and the earliest stage of DAT and between APOe4-present and APOe4-absent genotype in healthy control individuals. Participants responded “yes” to words that were previously semantically encoded, and “no” to words that were previously read aloud and to new words. The number of targets and distractors on the read “distractor” list was manipulated to investigate the degree to which aging and DAT influence the ability to recollect in the face of distractor familiarity due to repetition. Memory exclusion performance was better for healthy older adults than very mild DAT individuals and better for healthy control individuals with APOe4 allele than those without APOe4 allele even after controlling for standard psychometric performance. Discussion focuses on the importance of attentional control systems in memory retrieval and the utility of the opposition paradigm for discriminating healthy versus pathological aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributions of Fluency in Fame Judgments by Younger and Older Adults.

Judgments about stimulus characteristics are affected by enhanced processing fluency that results from an earlier presentation of the stimulus. By monitoring for an episodic source of processing fluency, younger adults can more easily avoid this influence than can older adults. In Experiment 1, older adults discounted the effects of fluency when task demands encouraged the use of analytic judgments based on general knowledge, rather than an appeal to episodic source monitoring. Younger subjects were not reliably affected by these same task demands and their judgments continued to be affected by processing fluency. In Experiment 2, introduction of more stringent demands led younger adults also to discount the effects of fluency. We conclude that the influence of processing fluency on younger and older adults varies, depending on whether memory for source or general knowledge is put forward in place of fluency as a basis for judgments. (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)     

Influence of the medium on children's story apprehension.

Compared children's apprehensions of an unfamiliar story either read to them from an illustrated book or presented as a comparable televised film. 24 younger and 24 older children (mean ages 7.6 and 9.6 yrs, respectively) were randomly assigned to one medium condition and individually presented the story. Response measures examined recall of story content as well as inferences about characters and events. Ss exposed to the televised story remembered more story actions, offered estimates of shorter elapsed time and distance traveled for carrying out a repeated story event, and relied more on visual content as the basis for inferences. In comparison, Ss who were read the story in picture book form recalled more story vocabulary, based their inferences more on textual content, general knowledge, and personal experience, and made more use of the storytelling situation as an opportunity to ask questions and make comments about the story. To the extent that children have repeated experience with specific media, such differential medium effects on apprehension suggest important implications for children's cognitive development. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inhibition of return and visuospatial attention in healthy older adults and individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Covert orienting of visuospatial attention in response to peripherally presented cues was assessed in healthy younger and older adults and those with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) during a simple detection task. The results yield both an age-related increase (Experiments 1 and 2) and a DAT-related increase (Experiment 2) in the facilitatory effect of a single peripheral cue on detection. By contrast, equivalent inhibition of return (i.e., a slowing of target detection at previously cued locations) was observed for all 3 groups when a 2nd cue was presented at central fixation. Results suggest that both healthy older adults and individuals with DAT experience changes in the posterior attention system thought to subserve visuospatial attention. Results also suggest limitations on the generality of inhibitory deficits in healthy aging and DAT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

False recognition effects in young and older adults' memory for text passages

Recent work has demonstrated an age-related increase in susceptibility to illusory memories; specifically, older adults make more false recognition responses to unstudied items when such items are semantically related to studied items. The majority of studies have examined false recognition for semantically associated words; the current study extends that previous work by examining false recognition effects for schematized story actions. In two experiments young and older adults studied schematized stories and were later given a recognition test for studied and unstudied story actions. Our results indicate that both age groups produced robust false recognition effects, but older adults were not more susceptible to these effects. These results suggest there are limits to the range of circumstances that yield age differences in illusory memories.     

Do younger and older adults’ communicative goals influence off-topic speech in autobiographical narratives?

The present research investigated younger and older adults’ communicative goals and their effects on off-topic speech for autobiographical narratives. Participants indicated their communicative goals by rating preferences among paired goals, for example, focus–fascinating, one of which was designated as an expressive goal, appropriate for producing elaborative speech, and one of which was an objective goal, suited to producing concise speech. The participants then told stories about episodic and procedural topics, which were rated by groups of younger and older listeners. Age differences emerged in communicative goals, where younger adults clearly favored expressive goals for episodic topics and objective goals for procedural topics. In contrast, older adults’ goals were more diverse, consisting of a mixture of expressive and objective goals for both topic types, without a clear preference. Younger adults’ goals predicted ratings of off-topic speech assessed by listeners: Younger and older adults were perceived as equivalently focused, coherent, and clear for episodic topics, but older adults were perceived as less focused, less clear, and more talkative than younger adults on procedural topics. These results suggest that age-related changes in off-topic speech emerge as a result of younger adults selecting goals designed to produce more succinct stories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of inference necessity and reading goal on children's inferential generation.

Examined inferential processing during reading. Adults and 3rd, 5th, and 8th graders read stories implying a consequence and answered questions. Some of the inferences were more necessary than others for comprehension according to T. Trabasso and P. Van den Broek's (see record 1987-18271-001) causal criteria, and the readers engaged in either superficial or integrative reading. Results showed that elaborative inferences were not as likely to be generated as those more necessary for comprehension. The necessity manipulation also produced a similar pattern of responding among the 4 groups, suggesting that even the young children were sensitive to the causal criteria. In addition, the integrative reading condition prompted a general slowdown for the 2 younger groups, whereas the 2 older groups were not as affected by reading condition. This pattern was interpreted in terms of differences in attention demands and working memory capacity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting conversion to dementia of the Alzheimer’s type in a healthy control sample: The power of errors in stroop color naming.

In the present study, we investigated which cognitive functions in older adults at Time A are predictive of conversion to dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT) at Time B. Forty-seven healthy individuals were initially tested in 1992–1994 on a trial-by-trial computerized Stroop task along with a battery of psychometric measures that tap general knowledge, declarative memory, visual–spatial processing, and processing speed. Twelve of these individuals subsequently developed DAT. The errors on the color incongruent trials (along with the difference between congruent and incongruent trials) and changes in the reaction time distributions were the strongest predictors of conversion to DAT, consistent with recent arguments regarding the sensitivity of these measures. Notably in the psychometric measures, there was little evidence of a difference in declarative memory between converters and nonconverters, but there was some evidence of changes in visual-spatial processing. Discussion focuses on the accumulating evidence suggesting a role of attentional control mechanisms as an early marker for the transition from healthy cognitive aging to DAT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of resource allocation are reliable among younger and older readers.

Younger and older adults read short expository passages across 2 times of measurement for subsequent comprehension or recall. Regression analysis was used to decompose word-by-word reading times into resources allocated to word- and textbase-level processes. Readers were more sensitive to these demands when reading for recall than when reading for comprehension. Patterns of resource allocation showed good test-retest reliabilities and were predictive of memory performance. Within age group, resource allocation parameters were not systematically correlated with other individual-difference measures, suggesting that strategies of on-line resource allocation may be a unique source of individual differences in determining comprehension of and memory for text. Age differences in allocation patterns appeared to reflect general slowing among the older adults. Because older adults showed equivalent memory performance to that of younger readers, the reading time data may represent the on-line resource allocation needed for comparable outcomes among older and younger readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)