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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Instructional manipulations and age differences in memory
— now you see them, now you don't | | Author(s) | Tamara A Rahhal, Lynn Hasher, Stanley J Colcombe |
| Journal title | Psychology and Aging, vol 16, no 4, December 2001 |
| Pages | pp 697-706 |
| Keywords | Memory and Reminiscence ; Performance ; Learning capacity ; Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25] ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | The instructions for most explicit memory tests use language that emphasises a task's memory component. The language may put older people at a disadvanatage relative to younger adults, because older people believe that their memories have deteriorated. Consequently, typical explicit memory tests may over-estimate age-related decline in cognitive performance. In two experiments, older and younger people performed a memory test on newly learned trivia. In both experiments, age differences were obtained when the instructions emphasised the memory component of the task (memory emphasis), but not when instructions did not emphasise memory (memory neutral). These findings suggest that aspects of the testing situation, such as experimental instructions, may exaggerate age differences in memory performance and need to be considered when designing studies investigating age differences in memory. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-020206212 A |
| Classmark | DB: 5H: DE: BB: SD6: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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