We examined age differences in the allocation of effort when reading text for either high levels of recall accuracy or high levels of efficiency. Older and younger adults read a series of sentences, making judgments of learning before recalling the information they had studied. Older adults showed less sensitivity than the young to the accuracy goal in terms of both reading time allocation and memory performance. Memory monitoring (i.e., the correspondence between actual and perceived learning) and differential allocation of effort to unlearned items were age-equivalent, so that age differences in goal adherence were not attributable to these factors. However, comparison with data from a judgment task neutral with respect to memory monitoring showed that learning gains among the old across trial were reduced relative to young by memory monitoring, suggesting that active memory monitoring may be resource-consuming for older learners. Regression analysis was used to show that age differences in the responsiveness to (cognitive/information-acquisition) goals could be accounted for, in part, by independent contributions from working memory and memory selfefficacy. Our data suggest that both processing capacity ("what you have") and beliefs ("knowing you can do it") can contribute to individual differences in engaging resources ("what you do") to effectively learn novel content from text.Age-graded declines in fluid abilities (e.g., working memory capacity, attentional processes, processing speed) can impact the outcomes of reading, most notably memory for the information in the text that was read (Johnson, 2003;Wingfield & Stine-Morrow, 2000). Poor discourse memory among older adults is often attributed to age-graded changes in processing efficiency (e.g., Hartley, Stojack, Mushaney, Annon, & Lee, 1994;Stine & Hindman, 1994), resulting in a degradation in the strength or fidelity of the text representation garnered from time allocated to the task. The effects of this decrease in processing efficiency on recall performance may be exacerbated by a neglect in the allocation of attentional resources to overcome changes in cognitive ability (Ratner, Schell, Crimmins, Mittelman, & Baldinelli, 1987;Stine-Morrow, Miller, & Leno, 2001;Stine-Morrow, Ryan, & Leonard, 2000;Zabrucky & Moore, 1994), essentially a self-regulatory phenomenon in which reading strategies do not fully accommodate to age-graded change in capacity.This study was motivated by the desire to understand why this accommodation may not occur. We considered the viability of three (not mutually exclusive) explanations. First, it could be that older readers' reduced working memory capacity impairs the executive control of selfregulatory processing (e.g., Thiede & Dunlosky, 1999). Second, it could be that fundamental components of metacognitive control (e.g., the ability to monitor the current status of memory and allocate effort appropriately) are compromised with age (e.g., Hertzog & Dunlosky, 2004). Finally, it could be that age-related change in motiv...

Previous research has suggested that older readers may self-regulate input during reading differently from the way younger readers do, so as to accommodate age-graded change in processing capacity. For example, older adults may pause more frequently for conceptual integration. Presumably, such an allocation policy would enable older readers to manage the cognitive demands of constructing a semantic representation of the text by off-loading the products of intermediate computations to long-term memory, thus decreasing memory demands as conceptual load increases. This was explicitly tested in two experiments measuring word-by-word reading time for sentences in which boundary salience was manipulated, but in which semantic content was controlled. With both a computer-based moving-window paradigm that permits only forward eye movements, and an eye-tracking paradigm that allows measurement of regressive eye movements, we found evidence for the proposed tradeoff between early and late wrap-up. Across the two experiments, age groups were more similar than different in regulating processing time. However, older adults showed evidence of exaggerated early wrap-up in both experiments. These data are consistent with the notion that readers opportunistically regulate effort, and that older readers can use this to good advantage to maintain comprehension.

This research examined age differences in the accommodation of reading strategies as a consequence of explicit instruction in conceptual integration. In Experiment 1, young, middleaged, and older adults read sentences for delayed recall using a moving window method. Readers in an experimental group received instruction in making conceptual links during reading while readers in a control group were simply encouraged to allocate effort. Regression analysis to decompose word-by-word reading times in each condition isolated the time allocated to conceptual processing at the point in the text at which new concepts were introduced, as well as at clause and sentence boundaries. While younger adults responded to instructions by differentially allocating effort to sentence wrap-up, older adults allocated effort to intrasentence wrap-up and on new concepts as they were introduced, suggesting that older readers optimized their allocation of effort to linguistic computations for textbase construction within their processing capacity. Experiment 2 verified that conceptual integration training improved immediate recall among older readers as a consequence of engendering allocation to conceptual processing.Age deficits in memory for text, while highly variable, are well documented (Johnson, 2003;Thornton & Light, 2006). Some research has suggested that one source of these age deficits is a tendency among older readers to use nonoptimal strategies of attentional allocation to linguistic processes (e.g., Hartley, Stojack, Mushaney, Annon, & Lee, 1994;Stine, 1990;Zabrucky & Moore, 1994). For example, older readers may sometimes neglect relational processing of new concepts introduced in the discourse, which presumably results in a less distinctive, more fragmented, and/or more fragile mental representation for text content, which in turn, makes veridical retrieval less likely (e.g., Radvansky, Zwaan, Curiel, & Copeland, 2001;Stine-Morrow, Miller, & Hertzog, 2006).In fact, successful text memory is selectively associated with the allocation of attentional resources to conceptual processing (Haberlandt, Graesser, Schneider, & Kiely, 1986;Miller & Stine-Morrow, 1998;Stine-Morrow, Milinder, Pullara, & Herman, 2001;Stine-Morrow, Miller, Gagne, & Hertzog, 2008). In the current studies, we investigated the effects of strategy instruction to focus attention on conceptual integration among younger and older readers, as way to both test the causal nature of the integration-recall relationship and to examine possible age differences in implementing such strategies.Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 226 Education Building, 1310 South Sixth Street, Champaign, Illinois, 61820-6990; eals@illinois.edu. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 July 1. The Nature of Text ProcessingLanguage understanding has been modeled as a process of creating a co...

Our findings are discussed in terms of implications for age differences in lapses of attention during reading and predictors of mind-wandering generally.

This study investigated age differences in the way in which attentional resources are allocated to expository text and whether these differences are moderated by content preexposure. The organization of the preexposure materials was manipulated to test the hypothesis that a change in organization across two presentations would evoke more processing effort (i.e., a “mismatch effect”). After preexposure, reading time was measured as younger and older adults read a target text to produce recall, answer comprehension questions, and solve a novel problem. Relative to the young, older readers allocated more time as they encountered new discourse entities and showed a stronger serial position effect, which are patterns of resource allocation that suggest more extensive processing of the discourse situation. Younger adults took advantage of repeated exposure to produce more extensive reproduction of text content, as well as more text-specific solutions to solve a problem. Older adults generated more elaborated inferences and were similar to young adults in terms of the dimensional complexity of problem solutions. Whereas younger readers showed weak evidence for a mismatch effect, older readers did not. These data are consistent with the proposal that older readers favor the situation model over textbase content in allocating resources to text, but this effect was not enhanced by introducing organizational difficulty in reprocessing.