Age-related differences in adults’ ability to follow spoken instructions

Abstract

Author note This work was funded by the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. Materials, data, and analysis code are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/3pv7e/).

Translating words into actions in working memory: The role of spatial-motoric coding

“…In support of this, there is some evidence that encoding-based enactment effects can be reversed by concurrent motor activity ( Plancher et al, 2019 ). Similar findings to those of Allen and Waterman (2015) have been observed in children aged 7–10 years ( Jaroslawska et al, 2016 ; Waterman et al, 2017 ), though older adults do not seem to benefit from enactment at encoding ( Coats et al, 2021 ; Jaroslawska et al, 2021 ).…”

“…In line with earlier findings in young adults (Koriat et al, 1990), children's performance was enhanced when they were required to carry out the target activities as compared with simply recalling them verbally. This enactment advantage is a robust effect and has since been widely replicated (e.g., Allen & Waterman, 2015;Jaroslawska et al, 2016Jaroslawska et al, , 2021Lui et al, 2018;Makri & Jarrold, 2021;Waterman et al, 2017;Yang et al, 2019Yang et al, , 2021 see Allen et al, 2022, for a review). Conditions in these experiments are typically blocked and it seems that the anticipation of subsequent enaction generates motor representations during encoding and these provide extra support for the performance (Koriat et al, 1990).…”

Collaborative learning of new information in older age: a systematic review

“…Prior research has shown that older adults are likely to experience a decline in working memory (Bopp & Verhaeghen, 2005;Elliott et al, 2011;Grégoire & Linden, 1997;Hale et al, 2011;Myerson et al, 2003;Park et al, 2002), with Elliott et al (2011) reporting that older adults experienced increased difficulty across all working memory tasks in their study. A decline in working memory can affect performance on a learning task, such as not being able to remember instructions (Jaroslawska et al, 2021), or not being able to assess relationships between pieces of information or create new associations. These difficulties may manifest due to an impairment in the encoding, maintenance, or retrieval stage of working memory (Halford et al, 1998).…”

Improving older adults’ ability to follow instructions: benefits of actions at encoding and retrieval in working memory

“…Self-enactment during the presentation can improve working memory for spoken instructions in healthy young adults (Allen & Waterman, 2015;Lui et al, 2018) and clinical populations with impaired working memory ability (Lui et al, 2018, patients with schizophrenia; Wojcik et al, 2011, children with autism). However, this encodingbased benefit of self-enactment has been rather weak and inconsistent for children (Jaroslawska et al, 2016;Waterman et al, 2017) and older adults (Charlesworth et al, 2014;Coats et al, 2021;Jaroslawska et al, 2021). In the latter case, Charlesworth et al (2014) found that both healthy older adults (aged 68 -90, mean 78.6) and individuals with mild Alzheimer's disease (aged 71-92, mean 82.4) showed a small benefit of self-enactment on a free verbal recall task, but two recent studies using serial recall have shown no such effect in healthy older adult groups (Coats et al, 2021;Jaroslawska et al, 2021).…”

“…However, research has only recently started to investigate the ability to follow instructions in older adults (Charlesworth et al, 2014;Coats et al, 2021;Jaroslawska et al, 2021).…”