Conscious and unconscious retrieval in picture recognition: a framework for exploring gender differences.

The authors explored gender differences by examining 2 distinct memory processes involved in recognizing pictures that were scenes captured from videotapes. For Study 1, the authors used a process dissociation procedure (L.J.

Adult age differences in knowledge of retrieval processes.

We assessed knowledge of retrieval processes in young (25-35 years) and old adults (70-85 years). Both feeling-of-knowing judgments and retrieval monitoring were examined with a set of questions about recent news events. For answers that participants initially failed to recall, they rated their feeling-of-knowing as well as made predictions regarding the likelihood of recalling the answer with the aid of a specified type of retrieval cue (retrieval monitoring).

Age differences in processing: assessments of depth, elaboration and encoding-retrieval compatibility with multidimensional scaling.

Young, middle-age, and old adults ranked similarities of word pairs in a conditional rank-ordering task. Multidimensional scaling analyses of those similarity judgments provided measures of depth of processing (the kind of attribute dimensions considered in ranking similarities) and elaboration (the number of dimensions considered). Analyses of variance revealed an age-related decline in semantic processing but no such decline for elaboration.

Developmental trends for auditory selective attention: dependence on central-incidental word relations.

Using the central-incidental learning task, we examined central task scores and numbers of correctly recognized incidental words for 48 children each from the first, fourth, and seventh grades, and for 48 adults. Differences in developmental trends were observed for subjects who heard related pairs of central and incidental words (compound words), unrelated word pairs, and central words only (control condition). In experiment 2, when incidental words were rhymes or synonyms of central words, fourth graders performed as well as did adults in the central phase of the task.