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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Frequency discrimination vs frequency estimation
— adult age differences and the effect of divided attention | | Author(s) | Sharon A Mutter, Kelly M Goedert |
| Journal title | The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological sciences and social sciences, vol 52B, no 6, November 1997 |
| Pages | pp P319-P328 |
| Keywords | Memory and Reminiscence ; Mental clarity ; Performance ; Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25] ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | In this experiment, the authors explored age differences in frequency judgement. Young and older adults studied words occurring from one to six times under divided or focused attention, and then completed either a frequency discrimination or a frequency estimation test for these items. Divided attention led to a poorer performance on both frequency judgement tests, suggesting that distraction during the encoding of target events results in less optimal encoding of the information that is necessary for any type of frequency judgement. Contrary to the notion that older adults encode this information more superficially than young adults, older adults were as sensitive as young adults to relative differences in the frequency of target words, and distraction did not magnify age differences for either type of task. On the other hand, older adults were less accurate in assigning an absolute numerical value to the frequency of the target words. Altogether, the results are consistent with the idea that the encoding and/or retrieval processes required for accurate numerical estimation of frequency suffer a larger age-related decline than do those required for accurate discrimination of relative frequency. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-980121414 A |
| Classmark | DB: DF: 5H: 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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