Centre for Policy on Ageing



Adult age differences in controlled and automatic memory processing
Author(s)	Nickolai Titov, Robert G Knight
Journal title	Psychology and Aging, vol 12, no 4, December 1997
Pages	pp 565-573
Keywords	Memory and Reminiscence ; Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25] ; Middle aged ; Performance ; New Zealand.
Annotation	The memory performance of groups of younger, middle-aged, and older participants was tested on indirect and direct tasks of word stem completion and on a process-dissociation task. As expected, on the direct tests of stem completion, older participants had lower scores than the younger and middle-aged groups. Age effects were also found on the indirect word completion test. The process-dissociation task allowed memory performance to be divided into controlled and automatic processing components. Estimates of automatic processing were comparable for the three groups, but there was an age effect for controlled processing, with the middle-aged and older groups differing from the younger group. These results confirm the findings of J M Jennings and L L Jacoby (Automatic versus intentional uses of memory, Psychology and Aging, 1993), and suggest that decline in conscious processing efficiency begins in middle age.
Accession Number	CPA-980224002 A
Classmark	DB: BB: SD6: SE: 5H: 7YN
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.