Free recall by in-school and out-of-school adults: Performance and metamemory.

Abstract

Forty women (10 young university students, 10 middle-aged university students, 10 middle-aged out-of-school subjects, and 10 elderly out-of-school subjects) were asked to study and recall a randomly presented categorized word list. The women were then asked to indicate which of a group of 20 mnemonic strategies they had used to remember the word list and to rank the 20 strategies according to usefulness in the memory task. On almost all measures (number of words recalled, number of words recalled per category, number of different strategies employed, frequency of use of the various strategies, and perceived usefulness of the strategies), the two in-school groups were more similar to each other, and the two outof-school groups were more similar to each other than were the two middle-aged groups. Analyses of covariance, using years of schooling as the covariate, reduced several of the differences between the two middle-aged groups of subjects. The combined results reveal that years of schooling, as well as actually being in school, may be better predictors than age of differences in metamemory and memory performance.

Does Believing in “Use it or Lose It” Relate to Self-Rated Memory Control, Strategy Use, and Recall?

“…Yet young adults are more likely to speak of using strategies in ways that imply flexible use of monitoring and prior knowledge in controlling memory. This outcome may be a reflection of the fact that 80% of our young adult population were currently students and therefore well-practiced in intentional memorization (Zivian & Darjes, 1983). This outcome may also be a meaningful indication that young adults are more prone to engage in dynamic self-regulation in cognitive tasks, which has been demonstrated in at least some situations (Dunlosky & Connor, 1997; Murphy, Schmitt, Caruso, & Sanders, 1987; see Hertzog & Dunlosky, 2004).…”

Relation of Everyday Activities of Adults to Their Prose Recall Performance

“…Zivian and Darjes (1983) found that the memory performance of middle-aged adults in school was as good as that of young university students, while the performance of middle-aged adults out of school for at least five years was as poor as that of older adults. The task used was a word-list recall task, in which older adults consistently perform more poorly than young ones.…”

Self-Reported Memory Complaints and Memory Performance in Elderly French Community Residents: Results of the PAQUID Research Program

“…In addition, several factors were found to be responsible for poor memory per formance on psychometric tests. In laboratory studies, older subjects were shown to perform at a lower level than younger adults on a vari ety of declarative memory tests including tests of verbal free recall, cued recall, paired-asso ciate learning and recognition memory [32][33][34][35][36], An age-related decline was also demon strated for tests of nonverbal memory, such as those involving memory for real objects, pic torial information, or abstract designs [37], Previous studies have also related poor memory performance to gender [38,39], low levels of formal education [40][41][42][43][44], and de pression [45][46][47][48], Based on a sample of 2,792 elderly subjects randomly chosen from the general population of Gironde, an area of southwestern France, the first goal of the present study was to exam ine the relationship between self-reported memory decline and poor memory perfor mance using psychometric tests that were de signed to evaluate visual recognition and ver bal-cued recall. The second goal of the present study was to determine the contribution of age, sex, educational level and depressive symptomatology to these two aspects of mem ory problems.…”