Young and older adults were tested at three delays on word-stem completion or cued recall following semantic or structural word judgments. Identical three-letter stems were present at retrieval for both implicit (completion) and explicit (cued recall) tasks; only the intention to recall list words differed. The young adults outperformed the older adults on both implicit and explicit tasks at all test delays. Under some conditions, the older but not the young adults performed more poorly on cued recall than on stem completion, suggesting a possible failure to use implicitly available information to support explicit remembering. These results suggest that some forms of implicit memory decline with normal aging.

Two experiments were conducted to assess age differences in the selectivity of visual information processing. Selectivity was measured by the amount of interference caused by nontarget letters when subjects detected a target letter in a visual display. In both experiments, young and elderly groups participated in search and nonsearch conditions; in the search condition targets appeared anywhere in the display, whereas in the nonsearch condition targets were confined to the center position of the display. In the first experiment, subjects were assigned to either condition for two sessions of testing, and in the second experiment each subject participated in both conditions. In both experiments nontargets produced larger interference effects for old compared to young adults in the search condition but not in the nonsearch condition. The obtained pattern of age effects could not be explained by age-related reductions in parafoveal acuity. The findings indicate that the magnitude of divided-attention deficit increases with age, whereas focused-attention deficits are unaffected by aging.

Age and brain hemispheric differences in visual-spatial performance were investigated using 2 versions of categorical and coordinate (metric) spatial relations tasks. Thirty-two young adults (M = 19.2 years) and 32 older adults (M = 68.8 years) participated. An overall age-related decrement in computing visual-spatial relations was obtained for lateralized presentations and when items were presented centrally. In contrast to some previous findings, there was no evidence to suggest differential aging of the right hemisphere in computing visual-spatial relations.

This article reports the results of a meta-analysis of the effects of age, education, and estimated year of measurement on scores from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised Digit Symbol Substitution Test. Analysis of effect sizes for age reported in 141 studies published between 1986 and 2002 indicated a mean standardized difference of -2.07. Age accounted for 86% of the variance in a regression model using age, education, and year submitted as predictors of Digit Symbol scores. There was no association between years of education or year submitted and Digit Symbol scores for younger adults or older adults.

Younger and older adults were tested on recognition memory for pictures. The Yonelinas high threshold (YHT) model, a formal implementation of two-process theory, fit the response distribution data of both younger and older adults significantly better than a normal unequal variance signal detection model. Consistent with this finding, non-linear zROC curves were obtained for both groups. Estimates of recollection from the YHT model were significantly higher for younger than older adults. This deficit was not a consequence of a general decline in memory; older adults showed comparable overall accuracy and in fact a non-significant increase in their familiarity scores. Implications of these results for theories of recognition memory and the mnemonic deficit associated with aging are discussed.