title: A prelearning manipulation falsifies a pure associational deficit account of retrieval shift during skill acquisition.
abstract: Older adults adopt memory-based response strategies during consistent practice more slowly and less completely than younger adults. In two experiments, participants either prelearned all, half, or none of the noun-pair stimuli prior to the completion of a standard noun-pair lookup task. Higher proportions of prelearning generally led to a faster and more complete strategic shift from visual scanning to memory retrieval during the lookup task, and a strong prelearning criterion for all items eliminated the age-related slowing of retrieval shift. However, the 50% prelearned condition resulted in strategy shift that was inconsistent with simple mechanistic associative learning, revealing a strategic set that was retrieval-avoidant in older adults.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0170, USA.
authors.forename: Jarrod
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hines
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hertzog
authors.forename: Dayna
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Touron
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D057566:Self Report; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult