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Recently Sarason (1972) and Wine (1971) discussed the negative effects of test anxiety within an attentional framework. Wine suggested that in evaluative situations high-testanxious (HTA) persons divide their attention between task-relevant and task-irrelevant information, for example, self-stimuli such as worry. Sarason focused on HTA subjects' attention to relevant and irrelevant situational cues. In the present research several implications of these attentional theories of test anxiety were investigated.The hypothesis that HTA subjects divide their attention between task-relevant and task-irrelevant information in evaluative situations was assessed by testing low-testanxious (LTA) and HTA children in an incidental learning task under either game or test instructions. We hypothesized that HTA subjects would have higher incidental and lower central learning scores than LTA subjects. Wine's (1971) suggestion that manipulations forcing attention to task-relevant stimuli should improve HTA subjects' performance was tested by requiring half the subjects to label the central stimuli as they were exposed. Labeling was expected to attenuate the performance differences between LTA and HTA subjects.Forty-eight children, 24 males and 24 females, from each of three grade levels were the subjects. The mean ages were 7.6, 9.9, and 11.9 years for the second, fourth, and sixth graders, respectively. Half were HTA and half LTA as determined by their scores on the Test Anxiety Scale for Children. The Requests for reprints and for an extended report of this study should be sent to

Biological theories of adaptation are used to generate a model of human cognitive development in which physiological and cognitive changes in aged persons can be understood as an adaptive stage of development in its own right. These changes, within an appropriate societal context, make elderly individuals better able to perform certain tasks, or at least uniquely able to provide them, in ways which increase group survival. Emphasis is given to tasks involving oral transmission of information, especially in storytelling contexts. Several hypotheses are generated suggesting that one’s memory for content and evaluation of message may be significantly increased as the teller’s age increases; supportive data are described. The utility of the theory for generating further hypotheses is demonstrated in the final section of this article.

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Central and incidental recall of young (Mean age=28.4) and elderly (Mean age=70.9) men and women was examined. As expected, statistically significant age differences were found for both central and incidental recall. For the eight items mean central recall (5.72) was significantly higher than mean incidental recall (2.56) at both age levels; mean incidental recall was significantly greater than chance for both age groups. Lack of an age X central/incidental interaction was interpreted as supporting a general recall deficit. No evidence was found to suggest an attentional focusing difference between young and elderly adults. Verbal labeling of the central stimuli had no effect on recall scores. Differential recall for each of eight positions of stimuli was also examined. Both age groups exhibited a spatial primacy-recency effect for central but not incidental recall. No support was obtained for an attentional interpretation of age-associated differences in learning.

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