Article Abstract:
Aging is thought to affect various aspects of physiological, psychological, and cognitive functioning in humans. Defects or deficiencies in the ability to retrieve facts into the working memory would decrease a person's ability to carry out cognitive tasks. This study examined whether retrieval of material from memory was slower in the elderly than in younger adults. The fan paradigm was used to study this question. It involves presenting subjects with a set of unrelated facts to be memorized. Speed and accuracy in retrieving these facts is then tested by having the subjects distinguish the facts already presented from unstudied facts. The fan effect is that performance varies with the number of facts given about a certain concept; the number of facts given is the fan size. As this size increases, speed and accuracy of retrieval of these related facts decreases. Tests were performed on 27 young adults (average age 19) and 27 elderly adults (average age 69); each subject was required to learn 18 study facts. Results showed that the older adults required more study cycles, 7.4 versus 5.0 for the younger adults, to answer all 18 questions correctly. Within each group of subjects, those that scored higher on vocabulary tests tended to learn the facts more quickly. The elderly subjects averaged 4.4 percent incorrect recalls in recognition trials, while the younger subjects averaged 2.1 percent, a significant difference. Both groups showed increases in decision times and error rates when the fan sizes increased, but the increases in errors were more pronounced in the elderly adults. These results indicate that elderly adults do have less efficient retrieval times that can affect their cognitive functioning. This appears to be caused by a decreased ability to separate relevant from irrelevant information. (Consumer Summary produced by Reliance Medical Information, Inc.)
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Article Abstract:
Three experiments measured age differences in the increase or decrease of letter-naming suppression effects, and tested the theory that inhibition plays a crucial role in concurrent selection. Clear age differences were found in suppression, with adults exhibiting no suppression and young adults showing a consistent level of suppression over the time period measured. No reliable connection was found between suppression and interference with concurrent selection. Suppression may serve to promote coherent thought in the face of distraction, rather than to assist selection.
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Article Abstract:
A study based on a fan effect paradigm shows that older and younger adults make similar utilization of mental models for fact retrieval. Both age groups build mental models based on the situations described by the facts, although the older subjects are slower and more error prone. Older adults show an exaggerated fan effect on subsets of related facts that is difficult to integrate into a single mental model.
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