Activation of emotion information in text among younger and older adults

The ability to represent emotions is an important capacity for the understanding of discourse. In the current literature, it is unclear whether older adults represent emotion information in the course of language processing, in particular as it relates to developing an adequate mental model of characters in narratives. We addressed this issue in two studies, one assessing emotion activation at the word level and the other at the mental model level. In the first experiment, subjects performed a lexical decision task in which words were drawn from both logic- and emotion-based categories. For both category types, priming was evident for young and old. In the second experiment, subjects read passages with emotion information that was consistent or inconsistent with the implied emotional tone. Both age groups showed an increase in reading time in response to inconsistent emotion information, indicating that the protagonist's emotional state was represented while reading. Results of these studies generally suggest age preservation in the activation of emotion information in language processing.     

Emphasis on autonomy and propensity for suicidal behavior in younger and older adults

A cognitive style marked by emphasis on autonomy has been linked to negative outcomes throughout the life span. Two preliminary studies are presented that examined factors on a measure of autonomy (Personal Style Inventory‐Revised) in relation to propensity for suicidal behavior (Suicidal Behaviors Questionnaire‐14; SBQ‐14). Perfectionism, B = .15, SE = 0.03, p < .01, and Defensive Separation, B = .04, SE = 0.01, p ≤ .01, predicted SBQ‐14 in younger adults. Need for Control, B = .234, SE = 0.10, p < .05, predicted SBQ‐14 in older adults. Findings suggest that aspects of autonomy may be relevant to understanding suicidal behavior; however, more research is needed examining the association between autonomy and suicidal behavior in the context of depression. Nonetheless, these studies suggest a promising avenue for future research.     

Memory complaints in younger and older adults

Two samples of older and younger subjects were administered a series of memory tasks and questionnaires tapping their perceptions about their own memory functioning. As in previous research, memory performance was usually better in the younger than in the older sample. In contrast, perceptions about memory varied little as a function of age, and these subjective reports were not related to objective memory performances. These results are relevant to theories that metacognition plays an important role in mediating performance declines with advancing age. If metacognition is implicated in age-related memory differences, it is some aspect of metacognition other than long-term beliefs about memory functioning (e. g. short-term perceptions that occur while attempting to perform memory tasks).     

Allocation of visual attention in younger and older adults.

Younger and older adults were compared in three experiments, using procedures that had been shown to affect the spread of visual attention. The attentional effects found in previous experiments were replicated. A broader focus of attention speeded responses to peripheral targets. In addition, two established findings concerning aging were replicated: Responses were slower in older than in younger adults, and, in certain conditions, they slowed more rapidly as target eccentricity increased. No interactions of age effects with attentional manipulations were found. The results of all three experiments were consistent with the interpretation that younger and older adults do not differ in the allocation of attention.     

Cognitive skill acquisition and transfer in younger and older adults.

The acquisition of cognitive skills often depends on 1 of (or a combination of) 2 processes, the execution of an algorithm, and the retrieval of problem instances. This study examined the effects of age and repetition of problem instances on the production and verification of solutions to 2 serially presented sets of alphabet arithmetic problems. Analyses of the parameters derived from power-function fits for individuals revealed age differences favoring young adults in improvement span, learning rate, and asymptote. For both age groups, the beneficial effects of repetitions on 1st-set response times were attributable to algorithmic speedup and to the retrieval of instances, whereas improvements in the speed of 2nd-set response times were attributable primarily to item retrieval.     

Memory performance awareness in younger and older adults

Reports on the course of memory-monitoring skills across adulthood are discrepant in conclusions and limited in scope. The purpose of this study was to build a large data base (3 samples and 7 different tasks) to assess performance awareness. Younger (19-41 years) and older (59-93 years) Ss estimated performance either before (i.e., predictions) or after (i.e., postdictions) completing each task. Predictions were less accurate than postdictions at both age levels, suggesting Ss monitored performance during the study-test cycle. Overall, the data suggested no consistent age effects in performance awareness: Age differences in monitoring occurred only in predictions and only for some tasks. Between-tasks differences in age effects could not be attributed to a single mediating mechanism like those suggested in previous reports. Why previous research has produced conflicting conclusions about metacognitive development in adulthood is discussed in light of these data.     

Pictorial rehearsal effects in younger and older adults

Abstract

In three studies, we examined pictorial rehearsal effects in younger and older adults. Concrete and abstract line drawings that varied in the amount of pictorial detail were presented for study under different presentation conditions. In the pictorial rehearsal condition, each picture was followed by a blank rehearsal interval where the picture was no longer presented. In all three experiments, the poststimulus interval enhanced picture recognition for both age groups, relative to a control condition where no rehearsal interval occurred. These findings suggest that older adults, like younger adults, form and maintain visual images across a blank rehearsal interval. Implications of these findings for current views on imaginal processes in older adults are discussed.     

The hypercorrection effect in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT

The hypercorrection effect, which refers to the finding that errors committed with high confidence are more likely to be corrected than are low confidence errors, has been replicated many times, and with both young adults and children. In the present study, we contrasted older with younger adults. Participants answered general-information questions, made confidence ratings about their answers, were given corrective feedback, and then were retested on questions that they had gotten wrong. While younger adults showed the hypercorrection effect, older adults, despite higher overall accuracy on the general-information questions and excellent basic metacognitive ability, showed a diminished hypercorrection effect. Indeed, the correspondence between their confidence in their errors and the probability of correction was not significantly greater than zero, showing, for the first time, that a particular participant population is selectively impaired on this error correction task. These results potentially offer leverage both on the mechanisms underlying the hypercorrection effect and on reasons for older adults’ memory impairments, as well as on memory functions that are spared.     

Auditory negative priming in younger and older adults

Two experiments are reported in which performance of old and young adults in an auditory negative priming task was compared. Auditory negative priming was not smaller in old than in young adults. This result was independent of whether or not conditions were present that had previously been assumed to favour episodic retrieval, as opposed to inhibitory processes, as a basis of the negative priming phenomenon. The data from the present auditory negative priming experiments are incompatible with the global assumption that the efficiency of inhibitory attentional processes in general diminishes across the adult life span.     

Random noun generation in younger and older adults

We examined age-related changes of executive functions by means of random noun generation. Consistent with previous observations on random letter generation, older participants produced more prepotent responses than younger ones. In the case of random noun generation, prepotent responses are nouns of the same category as the preceding noun. In contrast to previous observations, older participants exhibited stronger repetition avoidance and a stronger tendency toward local evenness—that is, toward equal frequencies of the alternative responses even in short subsequences. These data suggest that at higher adult age inhibition of prepotent responses is impaired. In addition, strategic attentional processes of response selection are strengthened, in particular the application of a heuristic for randomness. In this sense response selection is more controlled in older than in younger adults.     

Part-set cuing effects in younger and older adults

In 3 experiments, the authors examined part-set cuing effects in younger and older adults. Participants heard lists of category exemplars and later recalled them. Recall was uncued or cued with a subset of studied items. In Experiment 1, participants were cued with some of the category names, and they remembered fewer never-cued categories than a free-recall condition. In Experiment 2, a similar effect was observed for category exemplar cues. There was also an age difference: By some measures, a small number of cues impaired older adults more than younger. Experiment 3 replicated this result and found that older adults were disproportionately slow in the presence of cues. Across experiments, older adults showed robust part-set cuing effects, and sometimes, they were disproportionately impaired by cues.     

Perceptual specificity and implicit auditory priming in older and younger adults.

Age differences in perceptual specificity for implicit auditory priming were examined in 3 experiments. All 3 experiments began with a study phase during which participants rated words based on perceptual (shallow encoding) or semantic (deep encoding) attributes. After the study phase, participants were asked to identify filtered versions of repeated and new words (implicit test) and then to make old/new recognition judgments (explicit test). In contrast to earlier findings (D. L. Schacter, B. Church, & D. M. Osowiecki, 1994), older and younger adults were equally sensitive to study-to-test changes in speaking rate (Experiment 1), fundamental frequency (Experiment 2), and voice (Experiment 3). Explicit memory, in contrast, was significantly poorer for older adults but was minimally affected by changes in surface features. Findings from the study are discussed with respect to their implications for establishing the mechanisms mediating perceptual specificity and for their importance in understanding age-related changes in implicit memory.     

State-based versus reward-based motivation in younger and older adults

Recent decision-making work has focused on a distinction between a habitual, model-free neural system that is motivated toward actions that lead directly to reward and a more computationally demanding goal-directed, model-based system that is motivated toward actions that improve one’s future state. In this article, we examine how aging affects motivation toward reward-based versus state-based decision making. Participants performed tasks in which one type of option provided larger immediate rewards but the alternative type of option led to larger rewards on future trials, or improvements in state. We predicted that older adults would show a reduced preference for choices that led to improvements in state and a greater preference for choices that maximized immediate reward. We also predicted that fits from a hybrid reinforcement-learning model would indicate greater model-based strategy use in younger than in older adults. In line with these predictions, older adults selected the options that maximized reward more often than did younger adults in three of the four tasks, and modeling results suggested reduced model-based strategy use. In the task where older adults showed similar behavior to younger adults, our model-fitting results suggested that this was due to the utilization of a win-stay–lose-shift heuristic rather than a more complex model-based strategy. Additionally, within older adults, we found that model-based strategy use was positively correlated with memory measures from our neuropsychological test battery. We suggest that this shift from state-based to reward-based motivation may be due to age related declines in the neural structures needed for more computationally demanding model-based decision making.     

Adaptation to visuomotor rotations in younger and older adults

Adaptation to a visuomotor rotation is known to be impaired at older adult age. The authors examined whether the impairment is present already at preretirement age and whether it depends on the difficulty of the adaptation task. Moreover, the authors tested predictions of the hypothesis that the age-related impairment pertains primarily to strategic corrections and the explicit knowledge on which they are based but not to the acquisition of an (implicit) internal model of the novel visuomotor transformation. The authors found an age-related impairment of adaptation and explicit knowledge already at preretirement age but no age-related change of aftereffects. With an incremental simplification of the adaptation task, age-related changes were able to be eliminated. Individual differences of the quality of explicit knowledge were associated with differences of adaptation, but not of aftereffects. When age groups were matched by explicit knowledge, age-related impairments of adaptation largely disappeared. However, a reliable difference remained in one of the experiments, suggesting that other processes of adjustment to a visuomotor rotation might be affected by aging as well.     

Allocation of visual attention in younger and older adults

Younger and older adults were compared in three experiments, using procedures that had been shown to affect the spread of visual attention. The attentional effects found in previous experiments were replicated. A broader focus of attention speeded responses to peripheral targets. In addition, two established findings concerning aging were replicated: Responses were slower in older than in younger adults, and, in certain conditions, they slowed more rapidly as target eccentricity increased. No interactions of age effects with attentional manipulations were found. The results of all three experiments were consistent with the interpretation that younger and older adults do not differ in the allocation of attention.     

Context affects feeling-of-knowing accuracy in younger and older adults

In feeling of knowing (FOK) studies, participants predict subsequent recognition memory performance on items that were initially encoded but that cannot presently be recalled. Research suggests that FOK judgment magnitude may be influenced by the total amount, or quantity, of contextual information retrieved related to the unrecalled target (e.g., Koriat, 1993). The present study examined the contribution of quality of that information to episodic FOK judgments. In addition, we tested whether the episodic FOK deficit demonstrated by older adults could be reduced by encouraging retrieval of contextual information relevant to the target. Three experiments demonstrated that quality of the retrieved partial information influenced FOK judgments in both older and younger adults; however, the manifestation of that influence was age dependent. The results also indicated that older adults required explicit retrieval of contextual information before making FOK judgments in order to make accurate FOK predictions. The results suggest that FOK accuracy may be partially determined by search processes triggered when participants are queried for contextual information.     

Monitoring one's own forgetting in younger and older adults

The present study examined whether there are age-related differences in the ability to accurately monitor forgetting. Young and older adults studied a mixed list of categorized words, and later recalled items when cued with each category. They then estimated the number of additional items that they did not recall-a form of monitoring one's forgetting. Older adults exhibited impaired memory performance compared with young adults, but also accurately estimated they forgot more information than young adults. Both age groups were fairly accurate in predicting forgetting in terms of resolution, indicating that aging does not impair the ability to monitor forgetting.     

Factors influencing word naming in younger and older adults

The present study examined age differences in the influence of 3 factors that previous research has shown to influence word-naming performance. The influence of word frequency, orthographic length, and orthographic neighborhood measures was examined using large-scale regression analyses on the naming latencies for 2,820 words. Thirty-one younger adults and 29 older adults named all of these words, and age differences in the influence of these factors were examined. The results revealed that all 3 factors predicted reliable amounts of variance in word-naming latencies for both groups. However, older adults showed a larger influence of word frequency and reduced influences of orthographic length and orthographic neighborhood density compared with younger adults. Overall, these results suggest that lexical level factors increase in influence in older adults whereas sublexical factors decrease in influence.