Smith for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and to Fergus Craik for discussion regarding some of the ideas expressed here.

A communication paradigm was used as an analogue to cued recall to separate age-related differences in encoding and retrieval. Younger and older adults (senders) generated a series of oneword clues that would enable other subjects (receivers) to generate a designated target word. Clue and target generation tasks, analogous to the encoding and retrieval components of cued recall, were conducted in the context of either a strong or a weak associate of the target. Clues generated by older senders were less effective than clues generated by younger senders in enabling receivers to generate targets, especially when clues or targets were generated in the context of a weak associate. A deficit among older receivers was also obtained, especially when a weakrather than a strong-associate context word was given to the receiver. Older adults experience difficulty with encoding and retrieval tasks that require processing of context-specific information that is not part of the generic information typically associated with a stimulus.The memory deficits experienced by elderly adults have been characterized by Craik and Simon (1980) as a consequence of the tendency to process the general or global features of an item, rather than the context-specific information that makes an item distinctive from other events in memory. Furthermore, the lack of contextual processing is attributed to a deficit in the availability of attentional resources. General information can be encoded automatically and effortlessly, but contextual integration is effortful and requires the expenditure of processing resources that are more strictly limited in the elderly (Craik & Byrd, 1982).Support for the idea that the encoding processes of younger and older adults are qualitatively different has been provided by studies done with the cued recall task. In this task, memory performance can be interpreted in terms of the encoding specificity principle, by which the nature of the information encoded determines whether a retrieval cue will be effective (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). For example, Simon (1979) compared the performance of younger and older adults when memory was cued by sentence frames in which targets had been embedded at study, and when no retrieval cue was provided. Sentence cues were found to be effective only for younger adults, suggesting that integration of target words with sentence contexts during encoding was curtailed in older subjects. The effectiveness of contextual cues was also This research was supported by Grant A7910 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to M. Masson. We are grateful to David Hultsch for allowing us to make use of the pool of older adult volunteers that he has developed. We extend thanks to Ian Begg, James Chumbley, and David Mitchell for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Michael Masson, Department of Psychology, University of Victoria. P.O. Box 3050. Victoria. Be. Canada V8W 3PS (e-mail address:mrnasso...

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.

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