Executive Function and Processing Resources as Predictors of Adult Age Differences in the Implementation of Encoding Strategies

Sources of individual differences in working memory: Contributions of strategy to capacity

“…This suggests that higher attentional control participants' overall recall advantage remained even when all the participants used the same encoding strategy. These results indicate that there may be important individual differences in implementing the story mnemonic, perhaps in the ability to integrate words within the story (see Bryan, Luszcz, & Pointer, 1999, for a similar interpretation with aging populations). These individual differences could reflect acquired mechanisms, including different levels of skill at elaborative encoding or constructing a theme linking unrelated words, or they may reflect acquired differences in knowledge content or vocabulary (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).…”

“…Although some evidence supports this hypothesis (Foos & Clark, 2000), other evidence is mixed (Marsh, Dolan, Balota, & Roediger, 2004). Interestingly, older adults may be as likely to use elaborative encoding as are younger adults (Bryan et al, 1999), which would mitigate against age differences. However, our results also point to the importance of requiring participants to process the cues, because we saw some evidence that high-span participants quickly understood the disruptive effects of part-list cues and attempted to avoid looking at cues.…”

Executive processes, memory accuracy, and memory monitoring: An aging and individual difference analysis

“…One possibility is that people who score high on executive function measures either choose better encoding strategies than people lower on executive function measures, or implement strategies more effectively (cf. Bryan, Luszcz, & Pointer, 1999). For example, we recently found that young adults scoring low on measures of executive function (as measured by OS-PAN) were more likely to encode a list of words for a test of free recall using rote repetition.…”

Adult Age Differences in Strategy Use During Verbal Fluency Performance

“…Scores re¯ect the number completed in 30 s. Articulation speed was assessed by the number of times participants could pronounce a 4-syllable word (television, continental and invitation) in 12 s. The total number of articulations for the three words was used. The alternate form reliability was quite good (r X89) Executive function was assessed by the Stroop Test (Stroop, 1935;Trennery, Crosson, DeBoe, & Leber, 1989), the Self-Ordered Pointing Task (SOPT; Bryan et al, 1999;Shimamura & Jurica, 1994) and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST; Grant & Berg, 1948). For the Stroop Test, participants were presented with one list of 112 colour names printed in incongruent coloured ink.…”

“…Speci®cally, successful performance on verbal¯uency tasks is believed to rely on verbal ability or word knowledge, the executive processes of strategic retrieval search and performance monitoring, and the speed at which information is processed (Bryan & Luszcz, 2000a;Bryan et al, 1997;Parker & Crawford, 1992;Salthouse, 1993). While speed of processing (Salthouse, 1996) and executive function (Bryan & Luszcz, 2000a;Bryan, Luszcz, & Pointer, 1999;Crawford, Bryan, Luszcz, Obonsawin, & Stewart, 2000) decline with increasing age, verbal ability tends to be well-maintained (Horn, 1982;Salthouse 1982). Therefore it has been suggested that verbal ability may help maintain verbal¯u-ency performance with increasing age (Bryan et al, 1997;Salthouse, 1993).…”