Imagery and Sentence Retention in Elderly and Young Adults

Summary

Mediational strategies and recall of sentences varying in imagery were compared in 46 elderly and young men and women. The Ss generated their own word and picture mediators for 12 concrete and 12 abstract sentences. Before each of three recall trials, Ss read over the original sentences without their mediators available. As expected, the elderly recalled fewer words from the sentences than did the younger adults. For both groups, concrete recall exceeded abstract, and total recall increased over trials. Age group comparisons of mediators indicated differences in the relative use of verbal (words) and imaginal (pictures) mediators by sentence type. Differential recall between concrete and abstract sentences for the two age groups despite the elderly's infrequent use of imagery on either suggested that Paivio's dual-encoding hypothesis applied only to the younger group. However, further analysis of the elderly's verbal mediators suggested that they had used different strategies for the two sentence types, and thus performed in accordance with Paivio's hypothesis.