| Abstract: | Three experiments examined frequency judgments and recognition memory in young and elderly adults. Subjects were presented a long list of words at either a 5-s rate (Experiments 1 & 3) or a 1-s rate (Experiment 2), after which frequency-judgment and recognition memory tasks were administered. Either an absolute (Experiments 1 & 2) or a relative (Experiment 3) frequency-judgment task was used. The recognition test, which involved repeated tests of some items, involved either one incorrect item paired with each correct item (Experiments 1 & 2), or four incorrect items (Experiment 3). Age-related differences in frequency judgments, for the more frequently presented items, were found in all three experiments. For the recognition scores, the predicted interaction between age and successive tests was found only in Experiment 3. The results were interpreted within the framework of age-related differences in elaborative encoding and in distractibility to irrelevant stimuli. |
