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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Irrelevant speech effect in aging
— an assessment of inhibitory processes in working memory | | Author(s) | Nancie Rouleau, Sylvie Belleville |
| Journal title | The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological sciences and social sciences, vol 51B, no 6, November 1996 |
| Pages | pp P356-P363 |
| Keywords | Cognitive processes ; Memory and Reminiscence ; Mental ageing ; Noise ; Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25] ; Canada. |
| Annotation | This Canadian study assesses the effect of normal ageing on the inhibition of irrelevant noise in a working memory task. Results show that recall in both young and older adults is generally affected when they are subjected to irrelevant speech. More precisely, recall is impaired in the presence of familiar and non-familiar verbal noises, but remains normal when distractors are non-verbal. This was found in two recall conditions, one where participants had to memorise standard sequences of seven digits (Experiment 1) and another where the length of the lists to recall was adjusted to the individual short-term memory (STM) span (Experiment 2). In both experiments, ageing did not impair inhibitory abilities, as older adults had no more difficulty than young adults inhibiting verbal auditory distractors. Results show a clear irrelevant speech effect (ISE), in which recall declines in the presence of familiar and non-familiar verbal noise, but is unaffected by white noise. |
| Accession Number | CPA-971125228 A |
| Classmark | DA: DB: D6: RAN: BB: SD6: 7S |
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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