Activity duration and adult age differences in memory for activity performance.

Young and elderly subjects performed a series of activities that varied in the duration of their performances (45 s, 90 s, and 180 s). Duration was found to have a negligible effect on the subsequent recall of the activities and on the magnitude of the age deficit in recall. Operationalization of the program for performing an activity seems essential for establishing a memory trace of that activity's performance, but the duration of performing that activity seems to yield no further enhancement of that trace.

Decreased cognitive function in aging non-insulin-dependent diabetic patients.

A cross-sectional study was conducted to determine whether normal, age-related declines in cognitive function are accelerated in non-insulin-dependent (type II) diabetes mellitus. Study participants ranged in age from 55 to 74 years. Results indicate that cognitive function is inferior in the patients with type II diabetes compared with a comparably aged, nondiabetic control group. On the basis of a series of cognitive tests, it appears that the cognitive impairment is due to a deficiency in memory retrieval rather than to an attentional or encoding deficit. Cognitive performance is poorer in diabetic patients with peripheral neuropathy or elevated hemoglobin A1c levels. The apparent cognitive impairment in aging patients with type II diabetes may complicate adherence to medical regimens.

Memory for topics of conversation: adult age differences and intentionality.

Young adults and elderly adults received a series of topics for discussion, followed by a recall test of the topics per se and a recognition memory test of the questions asked during the conversations. Half of the participants in each age group were forewarned of the subsequent recall test (intentional memory); the remaining participants were not forewarned (incidental memory). Null effects for instructional variation were found at both age levels for all memory scores. For recall, an age difference, favoring young adults, was found. However, no age difference was found for either the recognition of old questions as old or the recognition of new questions as new. The results were interpreted in terms of an age deficit for the retrieval of memory traces established by the comprehension of conversational content.

Frequency judgments by young and elderly adults for relevant stimuli with simultaneously present irrelevant stimuli.

Young and elderly adults judged the frequency of occurrence of right words (relevant information) and wrong words (irrelevant information) that had varying numbers of exposure in a multiple-item recognition learning study list. Elderly adults gave lower frequency values to right words than did young adults but only when each right word was accompanied by more than one wrong word in the study list. This outcome was attributed to an age difference in the distractability created by the presence of irrelevant sources of information. By contrast no age difference was found for the frequency judgments given to wrong words, words that presumably are processed at a superficial level by elderly adults as well as young adults.

Adult age differences in frequency judgments of categorical representations.

Adult age differences were examined for relative frequency judgments on a task in which categories had either zero, one, three, or five instances in a study list. Judgments required selecting from pairs of category names which member had the greater representation of instances in the prior list. Contrary to the results obtained in earlier studies using a task in which discrete events vary in frequency of occurrence, an age difference favoring young adults over elderly adults in accuracy of frequency judgments was found for categories. Neither instructional variation (incidental learning vs. intentional learning) nor variation in priming (cuing vs. noncuing with the list of categories prior to the study trial) yielded either main effects or interaction effects with age. The results were interpreted in terms of an age deficit in either the storage or the retrieval of memory traces of category names established by the automatic elicitation of implicit associative responses to instances of taxonomic categories.