Centre for Policy on Ageing



Aging and encoding in memory — false alarms and decision criteria in a word-pair recognition task
Author(s)	Michel Isingrini, Roger Fontaine, Laurence Taconnat, Agnes Duportal
Journal title	International Journal of Aging and Human Development, vol 41, no 1, 1995
Pages	pp 79-88
Keywords	Memory and Reminiscence ; Mental clarity ; Learning capacity ; Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25] ; Mature adults ; Testing.
Annotation	An experiment, using a false alarm (FA) recognition procedure with learning of highly associated word pairs, was conducted to examine the hypothesis of an age-related deficit in the distinctiveness of encoding. The evolution of the false alarm rate and of the C decision criteria was observed across three age groups: young adults, older adults, and older-older adults. The results show no age differences on C decision criteria, indicating that the increase in FA with age is not related to a subject compensation strategy, but is probably due to a failure in memory strength; and that older respondents produced significantly more false alarms to distractors related to target items than young respondents did, but that they did not differ in their false alarm rate for unrelated distractors. These results suggest that the encoding deficit gets worse in late adulthood.
Accession Number	CPA-970425017 A
Classmark	DB: DF: DE: BB: SD6: SDM: 3T
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing

...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.