Effects of context expectation on prospective memory performance among older and younger adults

This experiment examined the impact of context expectation on prospective memory (PM) performance among older and younger adults. Participants responded to PM target words embedded in an ongoing lexical decision task (LDT). Older and younger adults performed similarly on the PM task. Regardless of age, PM was significantly better for participants in the correct context expectation condition and significantly worse in the incorrect context expectation condition relative to participants who held no expectations about the context in which targets would appear. Participants’ LDT response latencies were used to assess cost of the PM task to the ongoing task. Latencies were discernibly longer in the LDT block where the PM targets were expected compared to the block where they were not expected. The findings provide new information about how context can be used to support PM aging and suggest that contextual information can be equally beneficial for older and younger adults.     

The relationship between need for closure and memory for schema-related information among younger and older adults

Two studies were conducted to examine the relationships among need for closure (NFC) and schematic information processing in younger and older adults. The results show increased NFC to be associated with less schematic processing (i.e., less memory for schema-consistent items, and more memory for schema-irrelevant items, out of all items memorized correctly), among older than younger adults. The findings of the studies are interpreted as demonstrating the age-associated deficit in information processing consistent with the level of NFC. Moreover, the results indicate that positive mood may play a role in facilitating information processing consistent with the level of NFC among older and younger adults. Finally, we present a framework for predicting when older adults will and will not effectively use schematic processing, considered a compensatory strategy for decline in cognitive abilities.     

Causal attributions and strategy use in relation to memory performance differences in younger and older adults

A metacognitive hypothesis to explain age differences in adult memory is explored here–that younger and older adults differ in beliefs about memory and strategic processing. The motivational beliefs that adults make for their own memory performances were examined across tests of recall, recognition, face–name learning, and appointment-keeping. Forty-eight older and 48 younger community-living adults were required to report the factors they believed influenced their performance and the memory strategies used for each task. A final questionnaire required subjects to rank order the importance of a list of causal factors. There were significantly more younger adults as compared to older adults who attributed performance to controllable factors (i.e. strategy use), although age differences in beliefs on a more familiar memory task were smaller than on other tasks. Moreover, within age groups, attributions to controllable factors were associated with increased memory performance compared to when memory was attributed to uncontrollable factors (i.e. ability, age). Believing that memory is uncontrollable may undermine the efficient use of effort in cognition, consistent with current metacognitive theory.     

Working memory for item and temporal information in younger and older adults

Two experiments examined age differences in mechanisms hypothesized to affect activation of item and temporal information in working memory. Activation levels were inferred from the ability to reject n-back lures matching items in different temporal positions. Information with the least decay had a performance advantage over less recent information, but was susceptible to the same temporal context errors found in all adjacent-to-target lure positions. Lures most distant from the current item showed a performance rebound. The pattern of increased magnitudes of age effects at adjacent-to-target positions indicated a reduction in older adults' working memory for temporal context information above and beyond item memory declines. Results overall support the emphasis on context information as a critical factor in working memory and cognitive aging.     

Cognitive monitoring and strategy choice in younger and older adults

Younger (24- to 39-year-old) and older (60- to 88-year-old) adults learned a list of vocabulary words; one half of the words were studied using a generally more powerful strategy (mnemonic keyword method), and one half mediated with a less powerful approach (generating semantic contexts). Before using these strategies as part of the experiment, neither younger nor older adults judged that the keyword method was more effective and neither group preferred one strategy over the other. After using the strategies and taking a test of strategically studied unfamiliar vocabulary words, the younger subjects reported accurately the relative effectiveness of the two strategies and selected the one that had worked better for them to apply to a subsequent list of vocabulary items. The older participants were not as aware of the differential potency of the strategies and did not rely as much as did the younger subjects on knowledge of strategy utility in making strategy choices. In short, metacognitive awareness of strategy effects produced by monitoring and use of metacognitive awareness in regulating strategy choice were more pronounced in the younger compared with the older sample in this study.     

Contextual information and memory for unfamiliar tunes in older and younger adults

We examined age differences in the effectiveness of multiple repetitions and providing associative facts on tune memory. For both tune and fact recognition, three presentations were beneficial. Age was irrelevant in fact recognition, but older adults were less successful than younger in tune recognition. The associative fact did not affect young adults' performance. Among older people, the neutral association harmed performance; the emotional fact mitigated performance back to baseline. Young adults seemed to rely solely on procedural memory, or repetition, to learn tunes. Older adults benefitted by using emotional associative information to counteract memory burdens imposed by neutral associative information.     

Time-of-day affects prospective memory differently in younger and older adults

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of circadian arousal on prospective memory performance as a function of age. We tested a younger (18–34 years) and an older group (56–95 years) of participants on- and off-peak with regard to their circadian arousal patterns in a computer-based laboratory experiment. For the prospective memory task, participants had to press a particular key whenever specific target words appeared in an ongoing concreteness-judgment task. The results showed that prospective memory performance was better on- than off-peak in younger but not older participants. Younger participants consistently outperformed older participants in all conditions. We conclude that prospective remembering underlies time-of-day effects which most likely reflect controlled processes.     

Mechanisms of autobiographical memory retrieval in younger and older adults

In this study, retrieval of autobiographical memories was compared within or without the context of a lifetime period and between younger and older adults. The results of two experiments demonstrated that memories were more accessible for younger and older adults when they were retrieved within a time period context than without such context. However, when the retrieval context was more constrained and limited to cue word memories, the benefit of retrieval context disappeared. The results also suggested that as compared with younger adults, older adults were more likely to selectively retain memories with distinctive characteristics, such as being self-relevant and emotionally intense, particularly when remote memories were involved. Mechanisms of autobiographical memory retrieval in younger and older adults.     

Goals-feedback conditions and episodic memory: Mechanisms for memory gains in older and younger adults

Research has established that challenging memory goals always lead to score increases for younger adults, and can increase older adults' scores under supportive conditions. This study examined beliefs and on-task effort as potential mechanisms for these self-regulatory gains, in particular to learn whether episodic memory gains across multiple trials of shopping list recall are controlled by the same factors for young and old people. Goals with feedback led to higher recall and strategic categorisation than a control condition. Strategy usage was the strongest predictor of gains over trials for both age groups. Age, goal condition, and effort also predicted scores across the entire sample. Older adults' gains, but not younger adults' gains, were affected significantly by the interaction of self-efficacy beliefs and goal condition, and condition interacted with locus of control to predict younger adult gains. These results emphasise the importance of self-regulatory effort and positive beliefs for facilitating goal-related memory gains.     

Effects of goal-setting and feedback on memory performance and beliefs among older and younger adults

This research examined the impact of goal-setting conditions on memory beliefs and performance among older and younger adults. After baseline recall and assessment of beliefs, participants were assigned to goal-setting, goals plus feedback, or control. Then, additional recall trials were followed by repeated memory beliefs assessments. For both younger and older adults, performance, motivation, and self-efficacy were affected positively by goal-setting. The impact of goals plus feedback was mixed and varied as a function of age and dependent measure. Success rates for reaching memory goals, which were low for the older adults, may have been a factor in these results. Adults' self-set recall goals were predicted initially by baseline performance and self-efficacy. On the final trial, goals were predicted by last trial performance, self-efficacy, and control beliefs.     

Verbal and pictorial elaborations enhance memory in younger and older adults

Abstract

These studies examined the facilitative role of verbal and pictorial elaborations in younger and older adults' recall of verbal material. During acquisition, subjects studied short sentences under one of several encoding/retrieval conditions where the presence of verbal and pictorial elaborations was systematically varied. Subjects later recalled the target adjectives, given the sentence frames as a prompt. In Experiment 1, explanatory verbal elaborations at study and test enhanced verbal recall for both age groups, but no benefit of pictorial elaborations was observed. In Experiment 2, pictorial elaborations improved recall for both age groups. A significant Age x Encoding Condition interaction effect revealed that the benefit was especially pronounced for the older adults. the implications of these results for understanding the facilitative effects of pictorial illustrations on older adults. recall of verbal material are discussed.     

Emotional prosody effects on verbal memory in older and younger adults

Prosody, or the way things are said, can modify the meaning of utterances making qualitatively different affective prosodies useful for understanding how auditory affective information is processed and remembered. In this study, we collected behavioral data from 225 younger (M age = 20.8 years, SD = 2.5 years; 119 males) and 225 older adults (M age = 71.6 years, SD = 6.5 years; 119 males) in order to examine age differences in emotional prosody effects on verbal memory. Participants were randomly divided into three subgroups according to different prosody listening conditions (positive, negative, and neutral) and prosody effects on a yes–no recognition memory task were investigated. The results showed how older adults who listened to the story read with a neutral prosody remembered more words than those who listened to the same story with a positive or negative prosody. Younger adults showed no valence effects. Our findings highlighted an age and affective prosody interaction that affects remembering in older adults alone.     

Electrophysiological response during source memory decisions in older and younger adults

We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) as individuals made source monitoring decisions in a paradigm in which the influence of item familiarity and goal relevance could be separately evaluated. Younger and older adults read a list of words and subsequently distinguished these words from foils in a running recognition test in which some foils were repeated after a lag of 6 items, creating familiar lures. Behaviorally, older and younger adults performed equally well in the recognition of study words and the rejection of singly presented foils. However, older adults were more likely to respond to the familiar lures as though they had come from the study list, thus producing the expected group difference in source-monitoring error. For younger adults the ERPs elicited by the targeted study words were maximal at posterior sites and significantly greater than those elicited by either familiar lures or foils. Older adults generated far less differentiated ERP waveforms but with a markedly greater amplitude at frontal sites. We interpret this frontal maximum in the context of poorer source monitoring as suggesting that older adults are more dependent on controlled processes to make discriminations that seem to occur much earlier and more automatically for younger adults.     

Affective review and schema reliance in memory in older and younger adults

Previous studies have found that, when remembering, older adults often rely more on schematic knowledge than do younger adults. We replicated this finding when participants were induced to review the facts of the event; furthermore, neuropsychological correlates suggested that this age-related increase in schema reliance is associated with declines in reflective processes. In addition, when they were induced to focus on their feelings and reactions when reviewing an event, both older and younger adults' later memory of the event was strongly affected by their schematic knowledge.     

Retrieval practice and elaborative encoding benefit memory in younger and older adults

Retrieval practice has been identified as a powerful tool for promoting retention. Few studies have examined whether retrieval practice enhances performance in older adults as it does in younger adults. Younger and older adults learned unrelated word pairs and were administered a test after a short (10 min) and long (2 day) delay. Encoding condition was manipulated between subjects, with participants studying the pairs twice, studying them once and taking an immediate test with feedback, or encoding them twice under different deep encoding conditions. In both age groups, equivalent benefits of testing relative to restudy were found. Deep processing also improved memory relative to restudy, suggesting that one factor that might benefit retention is varying the type of encoding task (either by testing or by providing a different instructional manipulation) to increase the accessibility of cues. Retrieval practice can support older adults’ memory and is a viable target for training.     

The effects of sleep on episodic memory in older and younger adults

Evidence on sleep-dependent benefits for episodic memory remains elusive. Furthermore we know little about age-related changes on the effects of sleep on episodic memory. The study we report is the first to compare the effects of sleep on episodic memories in younger and older adults. Memories of stories and personal events were assessed following a retention interval that included sleep and following an equal duration of wakefulness. Both older and younger adults have superior memory following sleep compared to following wakefulness for both types of material. Amount of forgetting of personal events was less during wakefulness in older adults than in younger adults, possibly due to spontaneous rehearsal. Amount of time spent sleeping correlated highly with sleep benefit in older adults, suggesting that quantity of total sleep, and/or time spent in some stages of sleep, are important contributors to age-related differences in memory consolidation or protection from interference during sleep.     

A comparison of visual working memory and episodic memory performance in younger and older adults

Working memory and episodic memory decline with age. However, as they are typically studied separately, it is largely unknown whether age-associated differences are similar. A task design was developed in which visual working memory and episodic memory performances were measured using the same stimuli, with both tasks involving context binding. A 2-back working memory task was followed by a surprise subsequent recognition memory task that assessed incidental encoding of object locations of the 2-back task. The study compared performance of younger (N=30; M_age=23.5, SD_age=2.9, range=20-29) and older adults (N=29; M_age=72.1, SD_age=6.8, range=62-90). Older adults performed worse than younger adults, without an interaction effect. In younger, but not in older adults, performance on the two tasks was related. We conclude that although age differences (Young>Older) are similar in the working memory and incidental associative memory tasks, the relationship between the two memory systems differs as a function of age group.     

Stronger evidence for own-age effects in memory for older as compared to younger adults

Three studies examined whether younger and older adults better recall information associated with their own than information related to another age group. All studies compared young and older adults with respect to incidental memory for previously presented stimuli (Studies 1 and 2: everyday objects; Study 3: vacation advertisements) that had been randomly paired with an age-related cue (e.g., photo of a young or an old person; the word “young” or “old”). All three studies found the expected interaction of participants’ age and age-associated information. Studies 1 and 2 showed that the memory bias for information arbitrarily associated with one's own as compared to another age group was significant for older adults only. However, when age-relevance was introduced in a context of equal importance to younger and older adults (information about vacations paired either with pictures of young or older adults), the memory bias for one's own age group was clearly present for both younger and older adults (Study 3).