In a study of how aviation expertise influences age differences in narrative processing, young and older pilots and nonpilots read and recalled aviation and general narratives. They chose referents for sentences referring to a protagonist or minor character mentioned 1 sentence (recent character) or 3 sentences (distant character) before this target sentence. All groups chose referents less accurately for sentences about distant and minor characters than about recent and protagonist characters, perhaps because these referents were less likely to be in working memory. Young readers and pilots were more accurate for distant and minor character target sentences in aviation narratives, and recalled aviation narratives more accurately. Expertise did not reduce age differences. Expertise differences may reflect decreased demands on working memory capacity, and age declines may reflect reduced capacity.
We examined whether elders share a schema for taking medication and if instructions are better understood and recalled when organized to match this pre-existing schema. Experiment 1 investigated if elders agree on how to group medication information into categories, and if they agree on an order for arranging this information. Elders tended to organize information into three categories, arranged in the following order: General information about the medication (purpose), How to take (dose and schedule), and Outcomes (emergency information). In Experiment 2, we compared instructions that were: (a) compatible with this schema in terms of grouping and order, (b) compatible only in terms of grouping (category order was changed), and (c) incompatible, not matching the model in terms of either grouping or order. Memory for medication information increased with the compatibility of the instructions to the model. Elders also preferred the more compatible instructions. The findings suggest that elders possess a schema for taking medication, which they use to understand and recall medication instructions.
We examined age differences in referent choice strategies when narrative organization and presentation mode taxed working memory. Readers could use the following cues to choose referents for an ambiguous pronoun: (a) thematic cue (main/minor character), (b) foreground cue (character in main/subordinate clause), and (c) recency of mention of character. Subjects read short narratives with a critical sentence that mentioned the main character in the main clause of the critical sentence (congruent condition) or in the subordinate clause of this sentence (incongruent condition). They chose the main or minor character as referent for a pronoun in the next (target) sentence. Experiment 1 examined how older and young readers use these cues with the Memory narrative presentation (target sentence presented on a separate page from the rest of the narrative). Young readers used similar strategies as those in Morrow (1985), where narrative presentation did not tax memory. Thus, the Memory presentation had little influence on their strategies. However, older readers were less consistent and tended to split in choosing the two characters. In Experiment 2, where narrative presentation did not tax working memory, older readers used similar strategies to the young readers in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 found that elders reading narratives with the Memory presentation recalled the nonpreferred character name after the narrative, suggesting that both characters were accessible from working memory. The study suggests that the Memory presentation mode in Experiment 1 interfered with elders' consistent use of narrative cues in choosing referents, especially when these cues conflict.
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