An example of age-associated interference in memorizing.
The study compared young and old intellectually superior individuals (mean ages 22.8 and 68.8) on Brown-Peterson memory tasks. Each trial required recall of four words following 15 seconds of backward counting, with a final recognition test for words in a 4-trial block. Each person participated in a switch and nonswitch condition of a Wickens paradigm--unchanged category membership of quadruplets for nonswitch and trial 4 change for switch. Usual recall loss from trial 2 onwards and recovery on trial 4 after a switch was found in both age groups, but significantly lower recall was shown by the old on trial 3 and also on trial 4 in the nonswitch condition. Recognition by the young was almost perfect, but the old had lower scores for words presented on trials 3 and 4 (nonswitch). All memory interference in young adults could, therefore, be attributed to retrieval difficulty, but a residual proactive deficit occurs in old adults.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology