Priming effects and recognition memory in young and elderly adults

The present study explores the effects of age on the priming of alternate homophone spellings and recognition memory. Sixteen young and sixteen elderly adults were given a general information test, a spelling test, and a test of recognition memory. By embedding the less frequently spelled member of different homophone units (e.g., write vs. right) in the general information questions, certain of the homophones were primed during this task. The effect of this priming was assessed through the subjects' choice of spelling for these words on the spelling test. Recognition memory was assessed by asking subjects to indicate which words from a longer list were presented during the spelling test. As found in prior research priming effects were observed in younger subjects; however, no significant priming effects occurred in the older age group. On the recognition test, homophones were more often correctly recognized than nonhomophones, and priming affected the scores of the young negatively, but had no effects, positive or negative, on the elderly. These results suggest possible differences in the underlying bases of memory loss in aged adults and amnesics.     

A visual recognition memory test for the assessment of cognitive function in aging and dementia

Young, non-demented elderly, and elderly demented subjects were administered a computerized visual recognition memory task. In the task, subjects were instructed to point out the new object from a group of objects whose number was progressively incremented. The test was subject-paced and made use of face-valid stimulus materials; it is closely comparable to tests developed for memory assessment in non-human primates that are sensitive to the effects of hippocampal ablation. The present task was found to elicit significant differences in performance between young and non-demented aged subjects, between the non-demented and demented elderly, and between demented subjects in the early and more advanced stages of senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT). In a discriminant analysis, the visual recognition memory test scores correctly classified 72.6% of the aged subjects and early SDAT patients. No significant difference in task performance was found between SDAT patients and demented patients with a significant cerebrovascular etiological component. Thus, although the task does not appear to be suitable for diagnostic purposes it would be useful for the assessment of treatment effects upon age-related cognitive dysfunction.     

Learning facts during aging: the benefits of curiosity

Background/study context: Recent studies have shown that young adults better remember factual information they are curious about. It is not entirely clear, however, whether this effect is retained during aging. Here, the authors investigated curiosity-driven memory benefits in young and elderly individuals.

Methods: In two experiments, young (age range 18–26) and older (age range 65–89) adults read trivia questions and rated their curiosity to find out the answer. They also attended to task-irrelevant faces presented between the trivia question and the answer. The authors then administered a surprise memory test to assess recall accuracy for trivia answers and recognition memory performance for the incidentally learned faces.

Results: In both young and elderly adults, recall performance was higher for answers to questions that elicited high levels of curiosity. In Experiment 1, the authors also found that faces presented in temporal proximity to curiosity-eliciting trivia questions were better recognized, indicating that the beneficial effects of curiosity extended to the encoding of task-irrelevant material.

Conclusions: These findings show that elderly individuals benefit from the memory-enhancing effects of curiosity. This may lead to the implementation of learning strategies that target and stimulate curiosity in aging.     

Adult age differences in memory for modality attributes

Young and elderly subjects performed on two memory tasks. The first task involved recognition of word content and identification of each word's sex of voice in the study list. An additional independent variable consisted of intentional versus incidental learning instructions. An age difference favoring young adults was found for both word recognition and sex of voice recognition, confirming earlier evidence found with a more difficult sentence recall task. Comparable age deficits were found on the second task involving word recognition and identification of each word's case format in the study list. Encoding of modality attributes does appear to be an effortful process and is susceptible to age deficits. However, contrary to the age differentiation hypothesis, the cross-task correlation between modality recognition scores was no greater for elderly adults than for young adults.     

Acquistion and retention of categorized material in normal aging and senile dementia

The “shopping list task” is a new verbal learning task with a high degree of face validity for elderly subjects. Learning and delayed recall performance were examined for three groups of subjects: young normals (n=63, median age=21), elderly normals (n=44, median age=69) and mild to moderately impaired senile dementia patients (n=60, median age=70). The young normal subjects performed best of the three groups in both initial learning and delayed recall measures. The elderly normals showed significant decrements in learning and recalling the list items (p<.01). The impaired elderly showed much greater performance decrements in both learning and recall. None of the subjects showed a deficit in delayed recognition. These results suggest that both storage and retrieval difficulties occur in normal aging and dementia. The recognition test results suggest that recall deficits evidenced by both elderly groups are in large part due to faulty retrieval mechanisms. Since the shopping list task discriminated well among the three groups, it has potential for memory assessment in clinical settings.     

Age differences in false recognition using a forced choice paradigm

Recent findings suggest that older adults may be more susceptible to false recognition responses than younger adults because of age differences in gist-based processing at both encoding and retrieval. It has been suggested that age differences in the quality of memory representations that result from this age-related reliance on gist processing can produce age differences in response criteria, with older adults employing more lenient criteria than young adults. Support for this argument comes from studies where suppressed false recognition in older adults occurs with shifts toward more conservative response criteria. The current study further examined this issue by minimizing the effects of response criteria by using a two alternative forced-choice task in the study of false recognition in young and older adults. This manipulation reduced false recognition in both young and older adults, but did not eliminate age differences in false recognition.     

Age and gender as factors in facial recognition and identification

The present study was designed to test adult age differences in the recognition and identification of faces. Young and old women were shown slides of faces paired with common first names. Their task was to associate the names and faces for a subsequent recognition test. On the test, subjects were shown a larger set of faces and they were asked to indicate which of the faces had been presented earlier. For those faces judged to be familiar, subjects were asked to select, from two alternatives, the name which was originally paired with the face. It was hypothesized that people would remember faces most like their own and, as predicted, young subjects tended to make fewer errors with young faces and old subjects tended to make fewer errors with old faces.     

Mnemonic strategies in older people: a comparison of errorless and errorful learning

OBJECTIVE: To compare the efficacy of errorless and errorful learning on memory performance in older people and young adults. METHODS: Face-name association learning was examined in 18 older people and 16 young controls. Subjects were either prompted to guess the correct name during the presentation of photographs of unknown faces (errorful learning) or were instructed to study the face without guessing (errorless learning). The correct name was given after the presentation of each face in both task conditions. Uncued testing followed immediately after the two study phases and after a 10-minute delay. RESULTS: Older subjects had an overall lower memory performance and flatter learning curves compared to the young adults, regardless of task conditions. Also, errorless learning resulted in a higher accuracy than errorful learning, to an equal amount in both groups. CONCLUSIONS: Older people have difficulty in the encoding stages of face-name association learning, whereas retrieval is relatively unaffected. In addition, the prevention of errors occurring during learning results in a better memory performance, and is perhaps an effective strategy for coping with age-related memory decrement.     

"It's a hair-dryer…No, it's a drill": misidentification-related false recognitions in younger and older adults

Memory for visual objects, although typically highly accurate, can be distorted, especially in older adults. Here we asked whether also erroneous identifications of visual objects subsequently corrected and replaced by a correct identification might induce false recognitions, and whether this is more likely to occur in older people. For this aim a new paradigm was developed. In the first phase, participants performed a visual object identification task with degraded pictures of objects and produced correct and false but subsequently corrected identifications. In the second phase, participants performed a surprise recognition task in which also false identifications were presented. False identifications elicited false recognitions, with a stronger and more reliable effect in elderly participants, suggesting that correcting the initial visual error is not sufficient to correct the memory for the experience. Moreover, misidentification-related false recognitions coexisted in memory along with correct recognitions of correct identifications. These findings are discussed in relation with age-related deficits in memory updating and strategic retrieval.     

Effects of aging and education on false memory

This study examined the effects of aging and education on participants' false memory for words that were not presented. Three age groups of participants with either a high or low education level were asked to study lists of semantically related words. Both age and education were found to affect veridical and false memory, as indicated in the recall and recognition of the studied word and nonstudied lures. A low education level had a negative effect on memory performance for both young and middle-aged adults. Older adults with a high level of education had a higher level of false memory than those with a lower education level. The results of this study are discussed in terms of the importance of education on false memory and mechanisms that create false memory of words in older adults.     

Adults' mental rotation of spatial information: Effects of age,sex and cerebral laterality

The mental rotation ability of young (mean age = 25.3) and elderly adults (mean age = 65.3) was assessed. Preferred cerebral hemisphere for information processing was determined by asking subjects questions designed to elicit lateral eye movements. Subjects were classified as preferring the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere, or neither hemisphere (mixed dominance). Participants were then given a task requiring them to match rotated blocks used in the Shepard and Metzler [13] experiment. Young subjects were more accurate than elderly subjects and males were more accurate than females at both age levels. There was no difference in accuracy as a function of preferred hemisphere for information processing. It was concluded that: (1) there may be no relationship between preferred hemisphere for processing and accuracy on a mental rotation task (2) there are age-related changes in the accuracy of mental rotation, and (3) males perform more accurately than females throughout adulthood on mental rotation tasks.     

Adults' mental rotation of spatial information: effects of age, sex and cerebral laterality

The mental rotation ability of young (mean age = 25.3) and elderly adults (mean age = 65.3) was assessed. Preferred cerebral hemisphere for information processing was determined by asking subjects questions designed to elicit lateral eye movements. Subjects were classified as preferring the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere, or neither hemisphere (mixed dominance). Participants were then given a task requiring them to match rotated blocks used in the Shepard and Metzler [13] experiment. Young subjects were more accurate than elderly subjects and males were more accurate than females at both age levels. There was no difference in accuracy as a function of preferred hemisphere for information processing. It was concluded that: (1) there may be no relationship between preferred hemisphere for processing and accuracy on a mental rotation task (2) there are age-related changes in the accuracy of mental rotation, and (3) males perform more accurately than females throughout adulthood on mental rotation tasks.     

Adult age differences in memory and linguistic integration revisited

Abstract

In recent studies questioning whether linguistic integration of semantic information declines with age, the performance measures were based on recognition of related sentences in the Bransford/Franks paradigm; and the conclusions about age differences in linguistic integration were based on equivalent recognition performance of young and old adults. In the current study, the measure of linguistic integration was based on inference in a linear ordering task. Subjects were students at the University of Maryland—34 between 18 and 23 years of age and 33 between 60 and 72. Recognition performance was equivalent for old and young groups, but linguistic integration was age related. Young subjects inferred the truth status of more sentences than did old subjects. These findings indicate that linguistic integration based on inference is age related and that equivalent recognition performance is not adequate evidence for equivalent linguistic integration. Furthermore, recent findings indicate that age deficits in making inferences using new information presented auditorily are due to deficits in memory for facts and in working memory. This study supports those Findings and indicates that they can be generalized to information presented visually.     

Adult age differences in memory and linguistic integration revisited

In recent studies questioning whether linguistic integration of semantic information declines with age, the performance measures were based on recognition of related sentences in the Bransford/Franks paradigm; and the conclusions about age differences in linguistic integration were based on equivalent recognition performance of young and old adults. In the current study, the measure of linguistic integration was based on inference in a linear ordering task. Subjects were students at the University of Maryland - 34 between 18 and 23 years of age and 33 between 60 and 72. Recognition performance was equivalent for old and young groups, but linguistic integration was age related. Young subjects inferred the truth status of more sentences than did old subjects. These findings indicate that linguistic integration based on inference is age related and that equivalent recognition performance is not adequate evidence for equivalent linguistic integration. Furthermore, recent findings indicate that age deficits in making inferences using new information presented auditorily are due to deficits in memory for facts and in working memory. This study supports those findings and indicates that they can be generalized to information presented visually.     

Age related factors in motor error detection and correction

Two preliminary investigations were conducted on the error detection and error correction capabilities on a simple motor task of young, middle-aged and elderly adults. The error detection task assessed the subjects' ability to discriminate which of two test movements was the same as a previously presented criterion movement. The error correction task required subjects to correct an erroneous movement so that it was the same as a previously experienced criterion movement. Error detection performance increased for all age groups as the discriminability of the incorrect alternative on the test trial increased, but the middle-aged and elderly subjects demonstrated inferior overall performance relative to the younger subjects. Older subjects gave higher absolute error correction scores especially at the low error discriminability level, and the younger subjects did not show the negative correction bias (algebraic error) as suggested by the performance of the two older groups. The data were discussed in terms of Adams' closed-loop theory of motor memory.     

Age differences in a controlled-lag recognition memory task

Sixty subjects, 30 young and 30 old, were tested for word recognition using a controlled-lag method. A significant age difference was found for both recognition and for a subsequent recall task. Young subjects were superior to old on both recognition and recall. The greater the lag between the two presentations of a word, the greater the number of errors for both age groups. Most errors were made towards the beginning of the list, with a sharp drop in the middle, and a slight increase in the end. The older people took more time to complete the recognition task than the young.     

Age differences in a controlled-lag recognition memory task

Sixty subjects, 30 young and 30 old, were treated for word recognition using a controlled-lag method. A significant age differences was found for both recognition and for a subsequent recall task. Young subjects were superior to old on both recognition and recall. The greater the lag between the two presentations of a word, the greater the number of errors for both age groups. Most errors were made towards the beginning of the list, with a sharp drop in the middle, and a slight increase in the end. The older people took more time to complete the recognition task than the young.     

Age-related differences in recognition memory for pictures

This study provided a normative data base for the Continuous Recognition Memory Test and also investigated age-related differences in recognition memory for pictures in a sample of 299 normal subjects (age range 10-89). Data analysis revealed that older subjects consistently set a lower response criterion (Cx), resulting in a significantly higher number of within-class false alarms. Older subjects also displayed significantly lower sensitivity (d'). Changes in sensitivity were attributed to both an increase in false alarms and a concurrent decrease in hits in subjects over 65. Analysis of the likelihood ratio (beta) revealed no significant change across age groups.     

Temporal memory and content memory for actions: adult age differences in acquisition and retention

Young adult and elderly adult subjects were tested under incidental memory conditions for recognition memory of content and temporal memory for the order of a series of actions performed in the laboratory. The tests were conducted both shortly after completion of the series and 24 hours later, with different sets of actions tested on each occasion. Recognition memory of content showed no forgetting for the young subjects, but significant forgetting for the elderly subjects. Memory for temporal information was substantially greater for the young subjects than for the elderly subjects. Both age groups showed substantial forgetting of temporal information over the 24-hour retention interval.