Forgetting of pictures and sentences over a long retention interval in young and older adults.

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
William N. Dudley, Professor Public Health Education (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

Abstract: Although age-related declines are typically reported for memory of verbal material, it has recently been reported (Park, Puglisi, & Smith, 1986; Park, Puglisi, Smith, & Dudley, 1987; Park, Puglisi, & Sovacool, 1984; Rybarczyk, Hart, & Harkins, 1987) that age-related decrements for picture recognition were not observed in older compared with young adults when both were tested immediately after encoding, even under conditions of nonceiling performance. However, Park, Puglisi, and Smith also measured picture memory after a 4-week retention interval and found that the comparable performance between old and young observed at immediate recognition was not replicable at the delayed interval; older adults performed significantly worse than young adults. This is a particularly interesting finding because Rybarczyk et al. measured picture recognition in young and older adults after a 48-hr interval and reported no evidence for an age-related decline at this interval. If both findings are reliable, this suggests that age-related differences in picture memory will be better understood by measuring retention across a number of intervals.

Additional Information

Publication
Psychology and aging, 3(1), 94-5
Language: English
Date: 1988
Keywords
Age-related memory decline, Picture recognition

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