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 enc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPsychology and aging Vol. 25; no. 2; p. 486
Main Authors Wang, Wei-Chun, Dew, Ilana T Z, Giovanello, Kelly S
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.06.2010
Subjects
Adolescent
Adult
Aged
Aging - psychology
Attention
Female
Humans
Intention
Male
Mental Recall
Middle Aged
Neuropsychological Tests - statistics & numerical data
Paired-Associate Learning
Psychometrics
Recognition, Psychology
Young Adult
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1939-1498
DOI:10.1037/a0017264