No abstract

Young and older adults (elderly in Experiment 1 and middle-aged in Experiment 2) received successive sentence recall tasks for which one-half of the sentences were read in a male voice and one-half in a female voice. With regard to the sex of voice component, the first task was administered under incidental learning conditions and the second under intentional learning conditions. With regard to sentence content, both tasks were administered under intentional learning conditions. The results indicated that encoding voice information is a cognitively effortful, age sensitive process. For older adults, both elderly and middle-aged, enhanced voice encoding under the intentional condition, relative to the incidental condition, was accompanied by a significant decrement in sentence recall. For young adults, the trade off effect was not large enough to reach statistical significance. The age difference apparently reflects the diminished processing capacity of older adults relative to young adults, with the decrease in capacity having its onset by middle age.

Data from a recent project involving 362 adults ranging from 20 to 79 years of age were reanalyzed to examine the effects of statistical control of self-assessed health status on the age trends in several measures of cognitive functioning. The major result was that the age trends were virtually identical with, and without, control of the health-status variable. Implications of the views that the lack of health influences was due to a narrow range of health status or to insensitive assessment of health status were discussed.

Young and elderly adults were tested for memory of activities on a series of tasks (e.g., letter cancellation, anagrams) that varied along the rote-cognitive dimension, Half of the participants in each age group were forewarned of the subsequent memory test (intentional learning); the remaining participants were not forewarned (incidental learning). An overall age difference, favoring young adults, was found. However, the magnitude of the age difference varied across activities, being slight for cognitively demanding tasks and pronounced for less demanding activities. Memory was unaffected by the forewarning variable for both age groups. The results were interpreted in terms of an age deficit in the retrieval of memory traces established by activities, with cognitively demanding activities yielding more distinctive, and therefore more retrievable, traces than less demanding activities for elderly adults.Requests for reprints should be sent to D.