Nursery schoolers and first-and third-graders participated in an interview which assessed recall, comprehension, and perceived importance of three sources of self-knowledge: social feedback, self-observation, and social comparison. For recall measures, these sources were embedded in stories about a child making a self-discovery. Recall of all three sources improved with grade level, and feedback was the best remembered self-validational process. Comprehension was defined as the ability to identify the sources as depicted in line drawings, and it, too, increased with grade level. All three sources were well understood by older children, but preschoolers had difficulty with the concept of social comparison. Ratings of importance, also assessed using line drawings, were independent of grade level. When selecting their own "very best" source of self-knowledge, children cited self-observation most frequently. A supplementary sample of preschoolers nominated the best source of self-knowledge for other children rather than for themselves; under these instructions, feedback from others emerged as the preferred source.Self-perceivers increasingly engage in metacognitive appraisals of themselves as they gain in experience and cognitive complexity (Flavell, 1979(Flavell, , 1981). An example is an activity that could be called meta-selfperception: people can reflect upon their strategies for developing selfknowledge and validating the self-concept.Formal theories of self-conception have suggested three sources of self-knowledge (Rosenberg, 1979;Shaver, 1975;Wegner & Vallacher,

No abstract

All subjects were given two types of semantic encoding tasks; one encoding task directed attention to an item's thematic role (e.g., igloo was presented in the context of other items from the "North Pole" theme) and the other encoding task directed attention to the same item's role in some taxonomy (e.g., igloo was presented with other items from the dwelling taxonomy). Subjects were tested for free recall of the items followed by cued recall, the cues being theme and taxonomy labels. Young adults and middle-aged adults were more flexible retrieving items than older adults. They often switched modes during retrieval, recalling a few members from a theme and using the terminal item as a "pivot" to recall a few items from the taxonomy to which it also belonged. Flexibility was correlated with recall at each age; however, aging was associated with a less flexible style of retrieval.

The present study examined the effects of verbal ability and text genre on adult age differences in sensitivity to the semantic structure of prose. Young and older adults of low or high verbal ability heard narrative and expository passages at different presentation rates. The results demonstrated that older adults recalled less than younger adults and that age differences in recall were larger for low-verbal adults and expository texts. However, subjects from all groups favored the main ideas in their recalls for both types of passages. The results indicated that adult age similarities in the ability to focus on the main ideas when processing prose was not compromised by the verbal ability of the subjects or the organization of the passages used. However, the results also demonstrate how the characteristics of the learner and the characteristics of the text modulate the size of the age differences observed.

The present studies examined adult age differences in prose comprehension. Young and older adults from low-and high-education populations heard narrative passages at different presentation rates and difficulty levels. Immediately after listening to a tape-recorded version of each story, subjects orally recalled it. The results consistently demonstrated that younger adults remembered more than older adults, but subjects from all groups favored the main ideas in their recalls. Also, subjects from all ages and educational levels were equally able to identify the important information in the stories. It was suggested that sensitivity to the semantic structure of prose is not a major component of adult age differences in discourse comprehension. Furthermore, it was suggested that adult age differences observed on discourse comprehension tasks may reflect an age-related decline in processing capacity.Several studies have recently examined adult age differences in memory for prose materials