Adult age differences in remembering faces.

Assessed adult age differences in recognition memory for pictures of faces under different instructional conditions using data from 110 18–25 and 115 50–80 yr old Ss. The experiment was designed to test M. W. Eysenck's (see record 1975-05006-001) "processing-deficit" account of age differences in memory by varying S's encoding of the faces. Although older Ss recognized fewer faces, the elaborative orienting task facilitated recognition memory equally in the 2 different adult age groups. The processing-deficit hypothesis is not supported by this finding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive support at encoding attenuates age differences in recollective experience among adults of lower frontal lobe function.

Free recall and recollective experience were investigated in relation to low and high cognitive support at encoding and to neuropsychological measures of frontal lobe function (FLF) in 105 healthy adults divided into 3 age groups (young, young-old, old). Statistically significant main effects suggested free recall was inferior with increasing age and lower FLF. For recollective experience however, a significant interaction between age and FLF was modified by the provision of cognitive support at encoding. Recognition measures classified as familiar did not vary according to age, neuropsychological function, or encoding condition. The results suggest that the neural systems of the prefrontal cortex underlie age differences in recollective experience and that cognitive support modifies the influence of those systems in old age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowing and remembering: here''s to you, Lou Costa

A distinctive variant of a papillary noninvasive transitional cell carcinoma (TCC) of the vagina removed from a postmenopausal woman is described. The neoplasm was evaluated by immunohistochemistry. The designation of this neoplasm as a TCC is supported by its morphological features and its coexpression for cytokeratin (CK) 7 and CK 20. Its main feature is pagetoid infiltration into adjacent vaginal epithelium. This is the second reported case involving a transitional cell metaplasia (TCM) of the vagina, a possible precursor lesion of the TCC.     

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)     

Inhibitory control over no-longer-relevant information: adult age differences

Hartmann and Hasher (1991) used a garden-path task in which younger and older adults generated the final word for each of a series of high-cloze sentences. Under instructions to remember the final word, the experiment included critical sentences for which the generated word was replaced by a new, to-be-remembered target. Using an implicit priming task, the first experiment replicated a basic finding: Younger adults showed priming only for the target words, whereas older adults showed priming for both the generated and target words. Two experiments explored the boundary conditions. One showed that an additional sentence that interpreted the new target word enabled older adults to narrow access to only the target word. The provision of additional time following the introduction of the new target word did not. Specific information, not more time, is required for inefficient inhibitory mechanisms to clear the recent past from memory.     

Speed mediation of adult age differences in cognition.

Previous research has established that a large proportion of the adult age-related variance in various measures of fluid or process cognition is reduced when statistical control procedures such as hierarchical regression are used to eliminate variation in measures of perceptual speed. This finding was confirmed in the present study and was extended to include paired-associate and free-recall measures of memory in addition to measures of reasoning and spatial abilities. Most of the speed mediation was associated with speed measures requiring cognitive operations such as comparison or substitution instead of merely motor responses such as copying symbols or drawing lines. These results suggest that the rate of performing elementary cognitive operations is an important proximal mediator of the adult age differences in several types of cognitive tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparing recollective experience in true and false autobiographical memories.

This study investigated whether true autobiographical memories are qualitatively distinct from false autobiographical memories using a variation of the interview method originally reported by E. F. Loftus and J. Pickrell (1995). Participants recalled events provided by parents on 3 separate occasions and were asked to imagine true and false unremembered events. True memories were rated by both participants and observers as more rich in recollective experience and were rated by participants as more important, more emotionally intense, as having clearer imagery, and as less typical than false memories. Rehearsal frequency was used as a covariate, eliminating these effects. Imagery in true memories was most often viewed from the field perspective, whereas imagery in false memories was most often viewed from the observer perspective. More information was communicated in true memories, and true memories contained more information concerning the consequences of described events. Results suggest repeated remembering can make false memories more rich in recollective experience and more like true memories. Differences between true and false memories suggest some potentially distinct characteristics of false memories and provide insight into the process of false memory creation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recollections of faces: remembering differences and knowing similarities

Components of recollective experience were investigated in 4 experiments in which participants studied either similarities or differences among faces (relational vs. distinctive processing). Subsequently, when recognizing a face, participants indicated whether their decision was based on explicit recollection (remembering) or assessment of familiarity (knowing). Type of encoding interacted with judgments of recollective experience, so that the incidence of "remember" responses was higher following distinctive encoding than following relational encoding, whereas the opposite pattern of results was obtained for "know" responses. Furthermore, recognition of appearance-changed faces was based on feelings of familiarity, rather than on explicit recollection. The results support the dual-component notion of recognition but are inconsistent with the idea that dissociations between remembering and knowing merely reflect differences in conceptual and perceptual processing.     

Cognitive mediation of adult age differences in language performance.

Young (M?=?20 years) and old (M?=?68 years) adults completed language processing tasks, measures of working memory capacity (backward span and the n-back lag task), inhibitory efficiency (Stroop interference), and processing speed (color naming). Regression analyses revealed that each of the resource measures significantly predicted language performance and attenuated variance in language performance that would otherwise be attributed to age. When speed variance was entered into the equation first, the mediating influence of the inhibition and working memory measures remained significant. When speed and inhibition differences were controlled, the working memory measures could not reliably predict language performance. These results suggest that language performance differences may be fundamentally mediated by age differences in processing speed and inhibitory efficiency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition.

A theory is proposed to account for some of the age-related differences reported in measures of Type A or fluid cognition. The central hypothesis in the theory is that increased age in adulthood is associated with a decrease in the speed with which many processing operations can be executed and that this reduction in speed leads to impairments in cognitive functioning because of what are termed the limited time mechanism and the simultaneity mechanism. That is, cognitive performance is degraded when processing is slow because relevant operations cannot be successfully executed(limited time) and because the products of early processing may no longer be available when later processing is complete ( simultaneity ) . Several types of evidence, such as the discovery of considerable shared age-related variance across various measures of speed and large attenuation of the age-related influences on cognitive measures after statistical control of measures of speed, are consistent with this theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Temporal memory for performed activities: Intentionality and adult age differences.

Investigated rehearsal independency and the age insensitivity of temporal memory for prior performances on various tasks, using 36 young (aged 18.08–29.83 yrs) and 36 older (aged 60.25–85.83 yrs) adults. Ss performed under varying incidental/intentional memory conditions on 16 tasks (e.g., dot connection, card rotation, maze tracing) assigned to 4 time blocks separated by rest breaks. Following the last task, Ss received 2 tests of temporal memory. The first required identifying the time block in which each task was performed; the second required reconstructing the serial order in which the tasks had been performed. Temporal memory proficiency was equivalent under incidental and intentional memory conditions for each measure at each age level, thus supporting the rehearsal-independent nature of this form of episodic memory. However, an age deficit was present for each measure. Thus, temporal memory for performed activities appears to be age sensitive rather than age insensitive, as assumed by the automaticity of encoding hypothesis. However, the locus of age deficit in terms of the encoding stage or retrieval state of temporal memory remains undetermined. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related differences in absolute but not relative metamemory accuracy.

In 3 experiments, the effects of age on different kinds of metacognitive prediction accuracy were assessed. Participants made global memory predictions and item-by-item memory predictions in a single experimental task. Metacognitive accuracy was evaluated with correlational and more traditional difference-score measures. Difference-score measures were found, in some cases, to be sensitive to level of recall performance. Correlational techniques revealed that older adults monitored learning effectively. Relative to younger adults, they showed equally accurate immediate judgments of learning (JOLs), produced an equivalent delayed-JOL effect, and showed equivalent upgrading in the accuracy of their global prediction from before to after study of test materials. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in mental multiplication: evidence for peripheral but not central decrements

This study reports two mental multiplication experiments that were designed to measure age differences in central and peripheral processes. Experiment 1 varied task type (verification vs production), and Experiment 2 varied exposure duration (presentation until response, 600 ms, and 300 ms) on a production task. Neither experiment showed evidence of age differences in central processes (e.g., retrieval speed); however, there was some evidence of a peripheral-process (e.g., encoding) decrement for older adults. Specifically, there were no Age X Problem Size interactions for either experiment. Experiment 2 revealed decreasing age differences as problem difficulty increased. Indeed, for the 300-ms exposure duration, there were no age differences in RT or error rate. These results suggest that the magnitude of age differences in central processing speed are significantly less extreme than are age differences for peripheral processing speed for this type of mental arithmetic task. Also, older adults, in general, may have a higher skill level for basic fact retrieval in mental arithmetic than do young adults.     

Aging associations: Influence of speed on adult age differences in associative learning.

Two studies, involving a total of nearly 500 Ss, were conducted to determine the mechanisms by which processing speech contributes to the relations between adult age and associative learning. Results of both studies indicated that increased age was related to poorer associative learning largely because of a failure to retain information about previously correct responses. This in turn was related to the effectiveness of encoding briefly presented information in an associative memory task, which was related to measures of processing speed. It is therefore suggested that age-related decreases in speed of processing lead to less effective encoding or elaboration, which results in a fragile representation that is easily disrupted by subsequent processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Determinants of adult age differences on synthetic work performance.

Synthetic work research is designed to simulate complex work activities by requiring participants to perform several concurrent tasks. The current project consisted of 2 studies in which adults of different ages performed 4 tasks during 25 sessions in a synthetic work situation in 5-min periods across 3 days. Large age differences were evident in the total score in both studies, and they were maintained across all stages of practice. Detailed analyses revealed that with increased age adults in this time management activity were less likely to perform self-paced tasks and to attempt difficult auditory discrimination judgments. Very little independent age-related influences were evident after the initial few sessions on the task. More than 70% of the age-related variance after nearly 2 hr of practice was shared with measures of processing speed obtained before performing the tasks. These results suggest that age-related differences in basic processing efficiency may be responsible for a large proportion of the age-related influences on the performance of moderately complex activities presumed to be similar to those likely to be encountered in a variety of work situations.… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why do adult age differences increase with task complexity?

A total of 451 adults between 18 and 80 yrs of age participated in 2 studies conducted to investigate causes of the phenomenon that adult age differences in cognitive performance frequently increase with increased task complexity. All Ss performed 4 cognitive tasks at each of 3 levels of complexity. The strongest predictors of performance on the intermediate and complex versions of the tasks were performance on the simpler versions of the same tasks and a composite measure of working memory. It was concluded that one cause of the age-complexity phenomenon is that more complex cognitive tasks place greater demands on a working-memory resource that declines with increased age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowing when not to stop: selenocysteine incorporation in eukaryotes

The regulation of translation frequently involves protein-RNA interactions. An intriguing example of this is the alternative decoding of UGA, typically a stop codon, as selenocysteine. Two RNA structures, the mRNA selenocysteine insertion sequence (SECIS element) and a unique selenocysteyl-tRNA, are required for this process. In prokaryotes, a single RNA-binding protein, a selenocysteine-specific elongation factor, interacts with both the tRNA and mRNA to confer decoding. Whether eukaryotes use a similar mechanism is currently the subject of intense investigation.     

Antecedents of adult interpersonal functioning: Effects of individual differences in age 3 temperament.

We examined whether temperamental differences at age 3 are linked to interpersonal functioning in young adulthood. In a sample of over 900 children, we identified 5 distinct groups of children based on behavioral observations: Well-adjusted, undercontrolled, reserved, confident, and inhibited. At age 21, we assessed the children's interpersonal functioning in 4 social contexts: in the social network, at home, in romantic relationships, and at work. We found 3 patterns of relations: (a) Well-adjusted, reserved, and confident children defined a heterogeneous range of normative adult interpersonal behavior, (b) inhibited children had lower levels of social support but normative adjustment in romantic relationships and at work, and (c) undercontrolled children had lower levels of adjustment and greater interpersonal conflict across adult social contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Activity duration and adult age differences in memory for activity performance.

30 undergraduates and 30 elderly adults (mean age 69.86 yrs) performed a series of activities that varied in the duration of their performances (45, 90, and 180 sec). Duration had a negligible effect on the subsequent recall of the activities and on the magnitude of the age deficit in recall. Operationalization of the program for performing an activity seems essential for establishing a memory trace of that activity's performance, but the duration of performing that activity seems to yield no further enhancement of that trace. (8 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A field study of age and gender differences in habitual adult sleep

Retinoic acid (RA), a derivative of vitamin A, is an important molecule for development and homeostasis of vertebrate organisms. The intracellular retinoic acid binding protein CRABP-I has a high affinity for RA, and is thought to be involved in the mechanism of RA signalling. CRABP-I is well conserved in evolution and shows a specific expression pattern during development, but mice made deficient for the protein by gene targeting appear normal. However, the high degree of homology with CRABP-I from other species indicates that the protein has been subject to strong selective conservation, indicative of an important biological function. In this paper we have compared the conservation in the expression pattern of the mouse, chicken and pufferfish CRABP-I genes to substantiate this argument further. First we cloned and sequenced genes and promoter regions of the CRABP-I genes from chicken and the Japanese pufferfish, Fugu rubripes. Sequence comparison with the mouse gene did not show any large blocks of homology in the promoter regions. Nevertheless, the promoter of the chicken gene directed expression to a subset of the tissues that show expression with the promoter from the mouse gene. The pattern observed with the pufferfish promoter is even more restricted, essentially to rhombomere 4 only, indicating that this region may be functionally the most important for CRABP-I expression in the developing embryo.