Abstract
Age-related deficits have been consistently observed in free recall. Recent accounts of episodic memory suggest that these deficits could result from differential patterns of rehearsal. In the present study, 20 young and 20 older adults (mean ages 21 and 72 years, respectively) were presented with lists of 20 words for immediate free recall using the overt rehearsal methodology. The young outperformed the older adults at all serial positions. There were significant age-related differences in the patterns of overt rehearsals: Young adults rehearsed a greater number of different words than did older adults, they rehearsed words to more recent serial positions, and their rehearsals were more widely distributed throughout the list. Consistent with a recency-based account of episodic memory, age deficits in free recall are largely attributable to age differences in the recency, frequency, and distribution of rehearsals.
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. Email: [email protected]
This study was presented as a poster at the Ninth Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, April 2002.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Jodie Barden and Helen Palmer for collecting and scoring the data, and to Ursula Richards and Jessica Leech for assistance in data checking.
Notes
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. Email: [email protected]
This study was presented as a poster at the Ninth Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, April 2002.
This study was presented as a poster at the Ninth Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, April 2002.
Due to an administrative error, the young participants were allowed only 60 s, rather than 90s, to perform the task. Their scores were therefore adjusted by multiplying by 1.5.
One young participant misunderstood the instructions for this test; his data were therefore excluded from this comparison and also from the correlational and regression analyses presented in the Results section.
