Aging, imagery, and the bizarreness effect

ABSTRACT

This study examined the bizarre imagery effect in young and older adults, under incidental and intentional conditions. Intentionality was manipulated across experiments, with participants receiving an incidental free recall test in Experiment 1 and an intentional test in Experiment 2. This study also examined the relation between working memory resources and the bizarreness effect. In Experiment 1 young and older adults were presented with common and bizarre sentences; they later received an incidental recall test. There were no age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect in Experiment 1 when ANOVAs were used to analyze the data. However, when the bizarreness effect was examined in terms of effect size, there was evidence that younger adults produced larger bizarreness effect sizes than younger adults. Experiment 2 further explored age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect by presenting young and older adults with bizarre and common sentences under intentional learning conditions. Experiment 2 failed to yield age differences as a function of item type (bizarre vs. common). In addition, Experiment 2 failed to yield significant evidence that the bizarreness effect is modulated by working memory resources. The results of this study are most consistent with the distinctiveness account of the bizarreness effect.

Keywords:

• Distinctiveness
• Episodic memory
• Aging
• Bizarreness effect
• Working memory

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Forrest Scogin, Mark McDaniel, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ Hay and Jacoby's (1999) study provides evidence that older adults are not able to take advantage of subtle forms of semantic distinctiveness within a wordlist without environmental support. Their study may not be applicable to the current study. Participants would have to engage in an extensive amount of elaborative processing in order to take advantage of distinctiveness in the Hay and Jacoby study. They would have to first note the uniqueness of some of the items within the wordlist and then devise a strategy to take advantage of the distinctiveness. In the current study, the bizarre items are inherently distinctive because they depict events that are unlikely to be represented in long-term memory. It may be unnecessary for participants to engage in the same degree of elaborative processing to take advantage of distinctiveness in the current study in comparison with the Hay and Jacoby study.