Adult age differences in accessing and retrieving information from long-term memory.
The present study employed a series of cognitive decision tasks to investigate adult age differences in accessing and retrieving information from long-term memory. Young and old adults, from low and high education populations, were required to make feature, lexical, and categorical judgments about word pairs. Older adults were slower than younger adults at feature extraction, lexical access, and accessing category information. The age deficit was proportionally greater when retrieval of category information was required. The results suggest that one contribution to the diminished processing capacity in elderly adults may be their slower semantic access speed.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008606:Mental Processes; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D011581:Psychological Tests; D013997:Time Factors