Semantic Priming of Lexical Decisions in Young and Old Adults

Abstract

Twenty-four young (M = 28 years) and 24 old (M = 70 years) adults completed a lexical decision task in which they saw two strings of letters on each trial and were asked to respond "yes" only if both strings were words. For both ages, decisions were faster when the words were associated than when they were not. This pattern emerged for both ages, regardless of whether the associated pairs were category-member or descriptive-property associates. The same participants were also presented with a list of words to free recall. There was a decline with age both in the number of words recalled and in the degree of categorical clustering, particularly of low frequency category exemplars. Viewed from the perspective of two-process semantic activation models, these results place constraints on processing-deficit theories, and are consistent with the hypothesis that effortful processes change with aging, whereas automatic processes do not.

Aging and situation model processing

“…For example, semantic priming effects are similar in younger and older adults (Balota & Duchek, 1988;Burke, White, & Diaz, 1987;Howard, McAndrews, & Lasaga, 1981;see Duchek & Balota, 1993, for an overview), with shorter response latencies for high-strength targets in young and older adults, relative to low-strength and neutral targets (Balota & Duchek, 1988). Similar age invariance has been demonstrated for mediated priming (Bennett & McEvoy, 1999).…”

How much “effort” should be devoted to memory?

“…Guttentag (1985) has provided a thorough review of the similarities between children and older adults in the performance of certain laboratory tasks. The important similarities for purposes of cognitive effort are: both children and older adults are deficient, relative to young adults, on tasks that require deliberate mnemonic strategies (e.g., Cole, Frankel, & Sharp, 1971;Hultsch, 1971;Lange, 1978;Ornstein & Naus, 1978;Perlmutter & Mitchell, 1982); dual-task performance, one of which is a memory task, suffers disproportionately in children and older adults compared with young adults (e.g., Case, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982;Craik & McDowd, 1987;Guttentag, 1984;Kee & Davies, 1988;Macht & Buschke, 1983;Salthouse & Somberg, 1982); age-related differences both in children and in older adults are attenuated in incidental memory tasks, particularly when depth-ofprocessing orienting tasks are provided (e.g., Erber, Herman, & Botwinick, 1980;Geis & Hall, 1976;Ghatala, Carbonari, & Bobele, 1980;Mitchell & Perlmutter, 1986;Owings & Baumeister, 1979); and tasks that are presumed to rely on automatic processes reduce or eliminate agerelated differences (e.g., Burke & Vee, 1984;Hasher & Zacks, 1979Howard, McAndrews, & Lasaga, 1981). Thus, tasks that apparently require greater cognitive effort reveal larger age-related differences in memory than do tasks that require less cognitive effort.…”

Knowing but not remembering: Adult age differences in recollective experience

“…Several studies in the aging literature suggest that tasks requiring only activation of preexisting memory representations show minimal age differences, whereas tasks requiring integration of contextual information are more age sensitive (Balota & Duchek, 1988;Howard, McAndrews, & Lasaga, 1981;Light, Singh, & Capps, 1986; see also Hultsch, Masson, & Small, 1991;Light, 1991). Older adu1ts appear to have more difficu1ties than younger adu1ts do in remembering the source of the information that they have learned earlier, suggesting that there are age-related differences in memory for contextual detail.…”