Older Adults' Strategic Superiority with Mental Multiplication: A Generation Effect Assessment

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that older adults' simple arithmetic fact knowledge may be superior to that of college students, as evidenced by the older adults' more frequent use of direct memory retrieval (versus computation) as an answer generation mechanism. Whereas previous studies assessed strategy selection via self-report and/or reaction time, we have adopted the “generation effect” paradigm—better memory for items that are subject-generated versus those that are simply read. The memorial advantage of generation depends in part on the degree of effort involved in generating versus reading an item. Because direct retrieval is less effortful than computation, we expected qualitative age differences in answer generation strategies to manifest themselves as age differences in the magnitude of the generation effect, especially for problems with larger answers. With simple multiplication problem materials, the expected Age X Problem Size interaction was found. In a verbal materials comparison condition, the size of the generation effect did not differ across adult age.