Experimental Psychology, Cognition, and Human Aging

Kausler, Donald H.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4613-9695-6

Cited by 234 publications

(186 citation statements)

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“…Experiment 2 was designed to see ifthe results of Experiment 1 could be extended to a population other than college students. We chose to test elderly adults not only because they represent a different population, but also because they generally show more variation in cognitive task performance than college students (Kausler, 1982;Krauss, 1980). Although we observed much variability in the accuracy, confidence, and CR association in students, it is possible that even more variance would be present in elderly adults.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Instability of individual differences in the association between confidence judgments and memory performance

Thompson

Mason

1996

Mem Cogn

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There are large individual differences in the degree of association between the accuracy of memories and subjective confidence in those memories. Are these differences stable within the same test, and between alternate forms of a test? In Experiment 1, college students were tested on 3 recognition memory tasks, then retested 2 weeks later on alternate forms of the same tasks. The relationship between confidence judgments and recognition performance displayed low split-half stability and low alternate-forms stability.Asecond experiment with elderly adults replicated these findings. In a third experiment, college students recalled answers to general knowledge questions and rated confidence in the correctness of each answer. Individual differences in the association between confidence and recall performance were not stable across the odd-and even-numbered items on the test. These data indicate the need for the development of procedures that will produce stable estimates of individuals' metacognitive accuracy.The present research investigated the association between the accuracy ofmemories and a person's confidence in those memories, a topic that has long been of interest in psychology (see, e.g., Seward, 1928;Strong, 1912Strong, , 1913Trow, 1923). The association between confidence judgments and memory performance has been important in several areas ofresearch, and currently is one aspect ofmetacognition being studied along with others such as feelingof-knowing judgments, judgments oflearning, and calibration of comprehension. Also, in the eyewitness memory field, the usefulness of eyewitness confidence as a predictor ofrecall and recognition accuracy has been the subject ofmuch research (e.g., Brigham, 1990;Deffenbacher, 1980;Leippe, 1980;Luus & Wells, 1994;Perfect, Watson, & Wagstaff, 1993;Wells & Murray, 1984).Individuals can vary greatly in metacognitive accuracy, that is, how accurately their metacognitive judgments predict performance on a criterion task. For example, Deffenbacher, Leu, and Brown (1981) reported that individual subjects' point-biserial correlations between confidence judgments and performance on a face recognition task ranged from -.05 to .60. In the research presented in this article, Goodman-Kruskal gamma correlations between confidence and memory performance covered almost the entire possible range, from -1 to +1.The magnitude ofthese individual differences is not confined to studies in which Portions of these data were presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Boston, August 1990. We thank R. Crowder, R. Fisher, A. Glenberg, C. MacLeod, T.Nelson, and R. Proctor for their helpful reviews of earlier versions of this article. We also thank 1. Allen, R. Bonner, and D. DeMare for assisting with data collection. Correspondence should be addressed to W. B. Thompson, Department of Psychology, Niagara University, Niagara Falls, NY 14109-2208 (e-mail: wbt@niagara.edu). subjects make postrecall and postrecognition confidence judgments; correlations between feeling-of...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Instability of individual differences in the association between confidence judgments and memory performance

Thompson

Mason

1996

Mem Cogn

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“…Age-related change in executive function (e.g., Baddeley, 1996), which is responsible for allocating attentional resources, also is a likely contributor to problems understanding one person while inhibiting messages from other talkers (Tun, et al, 2002). In fact, there is ample evidence that aging brings about a reduced ability to ignore irrelevant information (e.g., Hasher & Zachs, 1988;Kausler, 1982;Wright & Elias, 1979) and/ or difficulty discriminating relevant from irrelevant information (e.g., Plude & Hoyer, 1985).The focus of the research presented in this paper is to better understand the degree to which (and why) older adults experience problems understanding speech in situations with more than one talker. This work is motivated by the large body of anecdotal and empirical evidence demonstrating that older adults, particularly those with hearing loss, have problems understanding speech that is masked by either noise or by other speech.…”

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Aging and Speech-on-Speech Masking

2008

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Objectives-A common complaint of many older adults is difficulty communicating in situations where they must focus on one talker in the presence of other people speaking. In listening environments containing multiple talkers, age-related changes may be caused by increased sensitivity to energetic masking, increased susceptibility to informational masking (e.g., confusion between the target voice and masking voices), and/or cognitive deficits. The purpose of the present study was to tease out these contributions to the difficulties that older adults experience in speech-on-speech masking situations.Design-Groups of younger, normal-hearing individuals and older adults with varying degrees of hearing sensitivity (n = 12 per group) participated in a study of sentence recognition in the presence of four types of maskers: a two-talker masker consisting of voices of the same sex as the target voice, a two-talker masker of voices of the opposite sex as the target, a signal-envelope-modulated noise derived from the two-talker complex, and a speech-shaped steady noise. Subjects also completed a voice discrimination task to determine the extent to which they were able to incidentally learn to tell apart the target voice from the same-sex masking voices and to examine whether this ability influenced speech-on-speech masking.Results-Results showed that older adults had significantly poorer performance in the presence of all four types of maskers, with the largest absolute difference for the same-sex masking condition. When the data were analyzed in terms of relative group differences (i.e., adjusting for absolute performance) the greatest effect was found for the opposite-sex masker. Degree of hearing loss was significantly related to performance in several listening conditions. Some older subjects demonstrated a reduced ability to discriminate between the masking and target voices; performance on this task was not related to speech recognition ability.Conclusions-The overall pattern of results suggests that although amount of informational masking does not seem to differ between older and younger listeners, older adults (particularly those with hearing loss) evidence a deficit in the ability to selectively attend to a target voice, even when the masking voices are from talkers of the opposite sex. Possible explanations for these findings include problems understanding speech in the presence of a masker with temporal and spectral fluctuations and/or age-related changes in cognitive function.The primary auditory complaint of many older people is difficulty understanding speech in noisy situations. Numerous studies have documented this age-related decline in the ability to comprehend speech in the presence of a masker (e.g., Dubno, Dirks, & Shaefer, 1987;Plomp & Mimpen 1979). This research has demonstrated that older adults with presbycusis generally have greater difficulty understanding masked speech than do young, normal-hearing individuals. Although a portion of this problem is because of the filtering and distortio...

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“…Researchers argued that, rather than reflecting increased susceptibility to interference, age-related differences in performance might instead reflect differences in the ability to acquire new information. In fact, when the level of original learning was equated, age differences in PI and RI were largely eliminated (for reviews, see Craik, 1977;Kausler, 1991).…”

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Aging, Subjective Experience, and Cognitive Control: Dramatic False Remembering by Older Adults.

Jacoby

Bishara

Hessels

et al. 2005

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

132

163

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Recent research suggests that older adults are more susceptible to interference effects than are young adults; however, that research has failed to equate differences in original learning. In 4 experiments, the authors show that older adults are more susceptible to interference effects produced by a misleading prime. Even when original learning was equated, older adults were 10 times as likely to falsely remember misleading information and were much less likely to increase their accuracy by opting not to answer under conditions of free responding. The results are well described by a multinomial model that postulates multiple modes of cognitive control. According to that model, older adults are likely to be captured by misleading information, a form of goal neglect or deficit in inhibitory functions.

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Experimental Psychology, Cognition, and Human Aging

Cited by 234 publications

References 0 publications

Instability of individual differences in the association between confidence judgments and memory performance

Instability of individual differences in the association between confidence judgments and memory performance

Aging and Speech-on-Speech Masking

Aging, Subjective Experience, and Cognitive Control: Dramatic False Remembering by Older Adults.

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