Selective adult age differences in an age-invariant multifactor model of declarative memory.

Abstract

Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test competing models of declarative memory. Data from middle-aged participants provided support for a model comprised of 2 2nd-order (episodic and semantic memory) and 4 1st-order (recall, recognition, fluency, and knowledge) factors. Extending this model across young-old and old-old participants established support for age invariance. Tests of group differences showed an age deficit in episodic memory that was more pronounced for recall than for recognition. For semantic memory, there was an increase in knowledge from middle to young-old age and thereafter a decrease. Overall, the results support the view that episodic memory is more age sensitive than semantic memory, but they also indicate that aging has differential effects within these 2 forms of memory.

Different Context but Similar Cognitive Structures: Older Adults in Rural Bangladesh

“…Our findings suggest that the structure of long-term declarative memory obtained in studies based on samples from high-income countries (e.g., Nyberg, et al, 2003) also fit well to individual differences in Bangladesh, although there is no literature using the identical set of cognitive abilities. This is in line with our first hypothesis.…”

“…Our hypothesis was, therefore, that a model of the cognitive structure that is established on Western populations (c.f. Laukka et al, 2013;Nyberg, et al, 2003) also fit the Bangladesh data well, and that these cognitive abilities can be seen as separate entities also in Bangladesh. A second aim of the present study was to examine how some important demographic factors, such as age and sex, are related to cognitive performance and the structure of cognitive abilities.…”

“…The focus of the present study was on five cognitive variables. Four of them, recall, recognition, verbal fluency and semantic knowledge are often regarded as long-term declarative memory (Nyberg et al, 2003), Verbal fluency may, however, also be considered as an aspect of executive control (Shao, Janse, Visser, & Meyer, 2014). The fifth studied cognitive ability, processing speed, is a measure of cognitive processing efficiency.…”

“…On the basis of previous findings from Western samples (e.g., Laukka, et al, 2013;Nyberg, et al, 2003), a five-factor cognitive model was tested through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA; see Figure 1) in order to examine if this cognitive model was effectual also for older people in rural Bangladesh.…”

“…These two memory forms are interrelated and also correlate highly with for example processing speed (Verhaeghen & Salthouse, 1997). Nyberg et al (2003) have shown that both episodic and semantic memory can be further divided into sub-forms, such as recall and recognition for episodic memory, and verbal fluency and semantic knowledge for semantic memory.…”