The Role of Adolescent IQ and Gender in the Use of Cognitive Support for Remembering in Aging

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of adolescent IQ (AIQ) and gender in older adults' ability to use cognitive support to enhance memory. Subjects were 269 mid-1940s graduates of the same high school. Adolescent IQ scores were gathered from archives, and subjects' memory for words was tested with tasks that provided increasing cognitive support. Overall, subjects benefited from support; women recalled more words than men; and persons with a high AIQ remembered more words than persons with a lower AIQ. However, while all subjects showed gains from cognitive support, men with a lower AIQ performed worse than men with a high AIQ. Women's performance was not dependent on their AIQ. Analysis of qualitative memory indicators suggested that women and persons with a high AIQ had better encoding and retrieval operations. Men with a lower AIQ appear to be particularly vulnerable to memory deficits in aging. This may be due to low “cognitive reserve” or generally poorer episodic memory function.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by grants from the Pilot Program of the University Memory and Aging Center (P50 AG08012) and the American Health Assistance Foundation, Clarksburg, MD. We thank Dawn Carrison, Nancy Catalani, and Alicia January for collecting and managing data, and Linda R. Rechlin for proofreading the manuscript. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Finally, we are grateful to the graduates of Cleveland Heights High School (classes of 1944, 1945, and 1946) for participating in this research.

Notes

¹ We refer to subjects with scores in the lower 25% of the distribution as having “lower” IQ because scores of 100 are defined as “average” in the population; referring to subjects with scores of 100 or higher as having “low” IQ seemed inappropriate.