Memory for everyday events plays a central role in tasks of daily living, autobiographical memory, and planning. Event memory depends in part on segmenting ongoing activity into meaningful units. This study examined the relationship between event segmentation and memory in a lifespan sample to answer the following question: Is the ability to segment activity into meaningful events a unique predictor of subsequent memory, or is the relationship between event perception and memory accounted for by general cognitive abilities? Two hundred and eight adults ranging from 20 to 79years old segmented movies of everyday events and attempted to remember the events afterwards.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDeficits in memory for everyday activities are common complaints among healthy and demented older adults. The medial temporal lobes and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are both affected by aging and early-stage Alzheimer's disease, and are known to influence performance on laboratory memory tasks. We investigated whether the volume of these structures predicts everyday memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA rapid event-related fMRI arrow flanker task was used to study aging-associated decline in executive functions related to interference resolution. Older adults had more difficulty responding to Incongruent cues during the flanker task compared to the young adults; the response time difference between the Incongruent and Congruent conditions in the older group was over 50% longer compared to the young adults. In the frontal regions, differential activation ("Incongruent-Congruent" conditions) was observed in the inferior and middle frontal gyri in within-group analyses for both groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFQ J Exp Psychol (Hove)
May 2009
Older and younger adults searched arrays of 12 unique real-world photographs for a specified object (e.g., a yellow drill) among distractors (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ability to ignore or control the processing of distracting information may underlie many age-related and individual differences in cognitive abilities. Using a large sample of adults aged 18 to 87 years, this article presents data examining the mediating role of distraction control in the relationship between age and higher order cognition. The reading with distraction task (Connelly, Hasher, & Zacks, 1991) has been used as a measure of the access function of distraction control.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnder instructions to ignore distraction, younger and older adults read passages with interspersed distracting words. Some of the distractors served as solutions to a subsequent set of verbal problems in which three weakly related words could be related by retrieving a missing fourth word (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report two experiments that investigate practice effects on Stroop color-word interference in older and younger adults. Both experiments employed a computerized, single-item version of the Stroop task with a voice response, and both involved practice over hundreds of trials. Both experiments showed generally similar practice patterns, including a practice-related reduction in the size of the color-word interference effect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychol Aging
September 2006
Older adults have more difficulty than younger adults appropriately directing their behavior when the required response is in competition with a prepotent response. The authors varied the difficulty of inhibiting a prepotent eye movement response by varying the response cue (peripheral onset or central arrow). The response cue manipulation did not affect prosaccade accuracy and latency for either age group and did not affect younger adults' antisaccades.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article provides a review of the first 20 years of Psychology and Aging, the American Psychological Association's first and only scholarly journal devoted to the topic of aging. The authors briefly summarize its history, its contributions to the study of aging, and its broader status as a scholarly publication. One theme highlighted in our review is the diversity of content in the journal throughout its history.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe explored incidental retention of visual details of encountered objects during search. Participants searched for conjunction targets in 32 arrays of 12 pictures of real-world objects and then performed a token discrimination task that examined their memory for visual details of the targets and distractors from the search task. The results indicate that even though participants had not been instructed to memorize the objects, the visual details of search targets and distractor objects related to the targets were retained after the search.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci
September 2005
We present a test of whether age-related differences in the management of interference during memory retrieval can be explained, at least in part, by decreased inhibitory mechanisms in older adults. We conducted this test by measuring the ease of retrieval of situation model representations that were sources of interference on the preceding trial but that contained the target information for the current trial. Prior research has shown that situation model retrieval under these conditions exhibits inhibition relative to an unrelated control.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA growing literature on decision making in older adults suggests that they are more likely to use heuristic processing than are younger adults. We assessed this tendency in the context of a framing effect, a decision-making phenomenon whereby the language used to describe options greatly influences the decision maker's choice. We compared decision making under a standard ("heuristic") condition and also under a "justification" condition known to reduce reliance on heuristics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo experiments are reported on the influence of cognitive aging on grammatical choice in language production. In both experiments, participants from two age-groups (young and old) produced sentences in a formulation task (V. Ferreira, 1996) that contrasted conditions allowing a choice between alternative sentence arrangements (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci
May 2002
This study examined the relationship between age and inhibitory functioning within a sample of older adults ranging in age from 60 to 85 years old. On the basis of earlier research, and confirmed by factor analysis, measures typically referred to as frontal lobe tasks were used as measures of inhibitory functioning. Findings demonstrated that inhibitory processes continued to decline with advancing age within the older sample.
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