Effects of aging and prospective memory on recognition of item and associative information.
Older adults typically perform worse than younger adults on tasks of associative, relative to item, memory. One account of this deficit is that older adults have fewer attentional resources to encode associative information. Previous researchers investigating this issue have divided attention at encoding and then have examined whether associative and item recognition were differentially affected. In the current study, we used a different cognitive task shown to tax attentional resources: event-based prospective memory. Although older adults demonstrated worse associative, relative to item, memory, the presence of the prospective memory task at encoding decreased item and associative memory accuracy to the same extent in both age groups. These results do not support the resource account of age-related associative deficits.
Wang
Wei-Chun
WC
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA. wwa@ucdavis.edu
Dew
Ilana T Z
IT
Giovanello
Kelly S
KS
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D011594:Psychometrics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult