Priming and aging: an electrophysiological investigation of N400 and recall.
Twenty young (20.5 years) and 20 middle-aged academics (57.2 years) performed a priming-recall task which was presented in three blocks. In each block, participants read 40 word pairs after which a recall task had to be carried out. Half of the word pairs were highly associated while the others were low associated. Targets showed the N400 of the middle-aged group to be both delayed and smaller in amplitude for low-associated items. N400 of primes, however, showed no age-related latency difference but was smaller for the middle-aged group due to a positive shift. It is argued that this shift possibly indicates age differences in semantic activation or buildup of context. A reanalysis showed individual differences in word pair processing to depend on recall performance. In general, high recallers were found to show a much larger differentiation between low- and high-associated targets. This resulted from a much larger N400 component elicited by low-associated targets and a more positive ERP in the N400-region for the high-associated targets. It is suggested that the middle-aged subjects activated the expected target word to a level at least equivalent to the younger subjects, but that the activated network itself was larger/less selective particularly in subjects showing a low recall.
Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany.
T C
TC
Gunter
J L
JL
Jackson
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G
Mulder
D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D013997:Time Factors