Aging and the Ranschburg effect: No evidence of reduced response suppression in old age.

Abstract

Two experiments tested 1 aspect of L. Hasher and R. T. Zacks's (1988) reduced inhibition hypothesis, namely, that old age impairs the ability to suppress information in working memory that is no longer relevant. In Experiment 1, young and older adults were asked to recall lists of letters in the correct order. Half of the lists contained repeated items while half were control lists. Recall of nonadjacent repeated items was worse than that of control items. This Ramschburg effect was larger (i.e., greater response suppression) in older than in young adults. In Experiment 2, young and older adults were required either to recall the list or to report if there was a repeated item. Repetition detection was high and similar in the 2 age groups. When age differences in overall performance were taken into account, there was evidence of increased repetition inhibition with age in both experiments. Thus, contrary to the general reduced inhibition hypothesis, the specific process of response suppression during serial recall is not reduced by aging.

Tactile Ranschburg effects: facilitation and inhibitory repetition effects analogous to verbal memory

“…Consistent with previous work (e.g., Crowder, 1968;Duncan & Lewandowsky, 2005;Henson, 1998a;Jahnke, 1969;Maylor & Henson, 2000), we showed inhibition of response (the Ranschburg effect) when the repeated items within a sequence were separated by two intervening items (Experiment 1 a). Again, consistent with previous work (e.g.…”

“…Here, participants are disinclined to recall within-sequence repeated items when such repetitions were present at encoding (e.g. Armstrong & Mewhort, 1995;Crowder, 1968;Duncan & Lewandowsky, 2005;Jahnke, 1969;Henson, 1998a;Maylor & Henson, 2000). For short presentation rates (approximately 100ms) the effect has been attributed to encoding failure (i.e.…”

Sequential Performance in Young and Older Adults: Evidence of Chunking and Inhibition

“…This assumption has subsequently been supported in a variety of contexts such as spelling (Houghton, Glasspool, & Shallice, 1994), mental arithmetic (Arbuthnott & Campbell, 2003), and serial recall (Maylor & Henson, 2000), showing that future goals are more available in working memory than past goals owing to the recent suppression of completed actions. In the context of everyday action routines, Cooper and Shallice (2000) have proposed that self-inhibition is applied at the level of sub-goals, and that higher order nodes (steps) remain active until the sub-goals are completed, after which they are inhibited.…”

“…There are relatively fewer studies of aging and self-inhibition (see Maylor, Schlaghecken, & Watson, 2005 for review), and among the few studies on the topic, evidence is mixed in terms of finding age-related reductions in self-inhibition (e.g., Maylor & Henson, 2000;cf. Schlaghecken & Maylor, 2005) or the conceptually similar construct of backward inhibition (Li & Dupuis, 2008;Mayr, 2001).…”

“…To check if the Lag -1 age difference observed above was due to age differences in the time course of self-inhibition (Maylor & Henson, 2000;FIGURE 3. Experiment 1: Intrusion error rates as a function of age group and lag.…”