Older adults' memory for the color of pictures and words.

Young and older adults were presented line drawings or matched words for study that were colored either red, green, yellow, or blue. Half of the research participants were instructed to remember the item and its color (intentional condition), whereas the other half studied only the item (incidental condition). Participants indicated their recognition of items and the color they believed positively recognized items were, regardless of their initial encoding instructions.

Memory for two types of spatial location: effects of instructions, age, and format.

Three experiments, with old persons (59-80 years) and college students (17-30 years) in Experiments 1 and 2 and with college students (17-24 years) in Experiment 3, investigated the differences between two types of spatial location memory: memory for the location of individual items in an array and memory for occupied, as opposed to unoccupied, locations in an array. Young persons performed better than old persons on both measures of location memory. However, an effect of instructions (intentional vs.

Picture memory in older adults: effects of contextual detail at encoding and retrieval.

In the present study, contextual detail was manipulated in a stimulus set by reproducing cartoon pictures intact or with much of the background obliterated. Young and older adults were presented cartoon slides both with and without contextual detail for study. During recognition, presence or absence of background was crossed factorially with its presence or absence during encoding, and participants indicated whether they recognized the cartoon.

Memory for pictures, words, and spatial location in older adults: evidence for pictorial superiority.

In the present study the spatial location of picture and word stimuli was varied across four quadrants of photographic slides. Young and old people received either pictures or words to study and were told to remember either just the item or the item and its location. Recognition memory for items and memory for spatial location were tested.

Self-perceived age changes in sex role self concept.

A prospective/retrospective study of sex role self concept was conducted in order to explore the hypothesis that adult men and women experience a convergence of sex roles in later life. Young (age seventeen to twenty-nine), middle aged (age thirty to fifty-nine), and older (age sixty to eighty-five) adults (twenty-one male, forty-one female in each group) rated themselves on Bem Sex Role Inventory items, first describing themselves at age twenty, next at age forty-five, and finally at age seventy. Self-perceived age changes in sex role self concept reported by these three groups of adults produced strikingly similar patterns.

Recognition of letters in words and nonwords.

Two visual search experiments were conducted to clarify the processes underlying the "word superiority" effect. Ss in both experiments (18 college students in Experiment 1; 18 college students and 18 older adults in Experiment 2) searched six, 50-item stimulus lists for the letters "a" and "r". Each item consisted of a string of four letters forming either a word or a nonword anagram of that word.

Spatial memory in older adults: effects of intentionality.

College students and elderly adults were presented with drawings for study that were placed on the left or right side of a photographic slide. Persons in the items-only condition studied only the target drawings, whereas persons in the items-position condition studied both the target drawing and its location to determine whether intentionality affected picture recognition or position recall. Half of the drawings were presented with an irrelevant adjacent drawing to assess the effect of presenting the target item relative to another drawing.

Semantic encoding in older adults as evidenced by release from proactive inhibition.

Wickens' Release from Proactive Inhibition paradigm was used to investigate semantic encoding in healthy older persons, nursing home residents, and college students. Significant PI Release effects, which did not interact with age, were obtained for taxonomic category and semantic differential dimensions. However, older persons, especially nursing home residents, displayed lower percentages of recall than college students, indicating that their semantic processing was less efficient.

Equating the social desirability of Bem Sex-Role Inventory masculinity and femininity subscales.

Two experiments investigated the social desirability of Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) items. Mean social desirability of the masculinity subscale was significantly higher than that of the femininity subscale in both experiments. A revision of the BSRI femininity subscale was suggested which replaced three items of questionable social value with three more socially desirable items and virtually eliminated the social desirability difference between masculinity and femininity subscales.

Sex role identity and self esteem in adulthood.

Sex role identity (Fem Sex Role Inventory) and self esteem (Texas Social Behavior Inventory) were examined in a cross sectional sample of 2069 Ohio State University students, employees, and alumni between the ages of seventeen and eighty-nine. Both men and women displayed peak masculinity scores in the middle years of adulthood, with no significant differences in femininity scores across the age range studied. Among both men and women, psychologically "androgynous" individuals displayed the highest levels of self esteem, followed by masculine sex-typed, feminine sex-typed, and "undifferentiated" individuals, in that order.

Trichomonas vaginalis infections in Sydney: laboratory diagnosis and prevalence.

The prevalence of trichomoniasis in Sydney was determined by examining 1070 sexually active females in three different practices. Infection rates ranged from 17.8% in a sympatomatic venereal-disease clinic group to 0.