Age differences in free recall and subjective organization.

Witte, Kenneth L.; Freund, Joel S.; Sebby, Rickard A.

doi:10.1037/0882-7974.5.2.307

Cited by 30 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Second, older adults may use semantic relations to initiate encoding and retrieval strategies during memory tasks. A consistent finding in the literature is that older adults are less likely than young adults to implement an encoding strategy (e.g., Luszcz, Roberts, & Mattiske, 1990;Witte, Freund, & Sebby, 1990).…”

supporting

confidence: 61%

Integrative and semantic relations equally alleviate age-related associative memory deficits.

Badham

Estes

Maylor

2012

Psychology and Aging

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Two experiments compared effects of integrative and semantic relations between pairs of words on lexical and memory processes in old age. Integrative relations occur when two dissimilar and unassociated words are linked together to form a coherent phrase (e.g., horse-doctor). In Experiment 1, older adults completed a lexical decision task where prime and target words were related either integratively or semantically. The two types of relation both facilitated responses compared to a baseline condition, demonstrating that priming can occur in older adults with minimal preexisting associations between primes and targets. In Experiment 2, young and older adults completed a cued recall task with integrative, semantic and unrelated word pairs. Both integrative and semantic pairs showed significantly smaller age differences in associative memory compared to unrelated pairs. Integrative relations facilitated older adults" memory to a similar extent as semantic relations despite having few preexisting associations in memory.Integratability of stimuli is therefore a new factor that reduces associative deficits in older adults, most likely by supporting encoding and retrieval mechanisms. showing greater age-related differences than others (e.g., Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000). In particular, episodic and contextual memory tend to exhibit larger age differences than content or item memory (Spencer & Raz, 1995). Naveh-Benjamin (2000) thus proposed an associative deficit hypothesis whereby older adults show specific deficits in forming associations between items. Naveh-Benjamin presented for study several pairs of unrelated words and then tested young and older adults" item memory (i.e., recognizing studied vs. new words) and their associative memory (i.e., recognizing intact vs. rearranged pairs). Older adults showed greater age deficits for associative memory than for item memory. A recent meta-analysis demonstrated that many studies have shown similar results (Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008).Research into age-related associative deficits has attempted to establish factors that can alleviate this memory deficit. One such factor is the semantic relatedness between to-beassociated items. Items are semantically related if they belong in the same category, such as shirt and sock, or are otherwise featurally similar, such as apple and ball. Naveh-Benjamin (2000, Exp. 4), Naveh-Benjamin, Hussain, Guez, and Bar-On (2003, Exp. 2) and Naveh-Benjamin, Craik, Guez, and Kreuger (2005 showed a reduction in age differences for associative memory with semantically related word pairs (e.g., shirt and sock) compared to unrelated word pairs (e.g., shirt and apple). Therefore, older adults are able to use semantic relations to enhance their associative memory performance relative to young adults. This finding suggests that older adults" associative memory deficit may be specific to new associations; older adults" memory for preexisting associations appears to be relatively unimpaired. Indeed, MacKay and Burke (1990) and Naveh-Benjamin an...

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supporting

confidence: 61%

Integrative and semantic relations equally alleviate age-related associative memory deficits.

Badham

Estes

Maylor

2012

Psychology and Aging

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“…A related point to note is that young adults are generally more likely than older adults to implement encoding strategies (e.g., Luszcz, Roberts, & Mattiske, 1990;Witte, Freund, & Sebby, 1990). However, it is possible that young adults are unable to implement an encoding strategy for associating nonwords as easily as for words.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-related associative deficits are absent with nonwords.

Badham¹,

Maylor²

2011

Psychology and Aging

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Words and nonwords were used as stimuli to assess item and associative recognition memory performance in young and older adults. Participants were presented with pairs of items and then tested on both item memory (old/new items) and associative memory (intact/recombined pairs).For words, older participants performed worse than young on item and associative tests but to a greater extent on the latter. In contrast, for nonwords, older participants performed equally worse than young on item and associative tests. This is the first study to demonstrate that a manipulation of stimulus novelty can alter age-related associative deficits.

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“…Recall consistency is preserved during normal aging (Parker et al, 2004), although agerelated declines were present when recall consistency was calculated using a different formula (Brown & Mitchell, 1991). Previous studies report that subjective organization declines in normal aging relative to young subjects (Davis et al, 2003;Witte, Freund & Sebby, 1990), and in subjects having frontal lobe lesions (Gershberg & Shimamura, 1995;Stuss, Craik Sayer, Franchi & Alexander, 1996). It is unknown if recall consistency or subjective organization are impaired in Alzheimer's disease.…”

Section: Recall Performancementioning

confidence: 99%