Biomedical subjects

A W Kersten

Publications and source records attributed to A W Kersten.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1999

Influences of age, performance, and item relatedness on verbatim and gist recall of verb-noun pairs.

Age differences in adults' memory for performed actions (e.g., wave hand) are sometimes smaller than age differences in memory for nonperformed phrases. In this study, we examined the conditions under which performance reduces age differences in recall. Younger and older adults performed or read verb-noun phrases that were either related (e.g., actions performed in a kitchen) or unrelated. Performance did not reduce age differences in recall of the exact verbs and nouns used to describe an action, but performance did reduce age differences in memory for the gist of related actions. Older adults especially had difficulty recalling the exact verb used to describe the action. These results suggest that older adults may have better memory for actions than is revealed by tests of verbatim recall. They may remember performing the action but not remember the exact words used to describe the action.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1998

Influences of age and perceived activity difficulty on activity recall.

After they performed each of a series of activities, older and younger adults were asked to rate the difficulty of the activity. Recall of the activities was later tested. Older adults tended to remember those activities they perceived to be less difficult, whereas younger adults tended to remember those activities they perceived to be more difficult. Thus, when more cognitive effort was required to perform an activity, older adults tended to have difficulty later remembering the activity. Difficult activities are hypothesized to tax limited processing resources and induce anxiety in older adults, preventing successful encoding.

Adult↗

PubMed1998

An examination of the distinction between nouns and verbs: associations with two different kinds of motion.

Four experiments provide evidence that people are biased to associate particular types of motion with nouns and different types of motion with verbs. Novel nouns and verbs were related to two types of motion: (1) path, or the direction of motion of one character with respect to the other character, and (2) movement orientation, or the direction a character was facing as it moved. Subjects associated verbs more strongly with path than with movement orientation. In contrast, they associated nouns more strongly with movement orientation than with path. Movement orientation was associated with both object categories and verbs, inconsistent with a complete division of labor between these two types of categories. These results are consistent, however, with the notion that people are biased to associate verbs with relations between objects, whereas they are biased to associate object categories with motions defined with respect to the object carrying out those motions.

Adult↗

PubMed1993

Decomposing adult age differences in symbol arithmetic.

A componential analysis was conducted to determine the locus of adult age differences in symbol arithmetic. Measures of the duration of two proposed components, substitution of digits for symbols and the addition or subtraction of the digits resulting from these substitutions, were obtained from 52 young adults and 52 older adults. Tests of working memory, perceptual speed, motor speed, and associative learning were also administered to all subjects. The results were most consistent with an interpretation postulating that the speed of many different cognitive processes decreases with increased age. Considerable age-related variance remained in the measures of symbol arithmetic performance after statistical control of working memory and associative learning performance, casting doubt on alternative hypotheses of the source of age-related differences in this task.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Processing speed and adult age differences in activity memory.

Immediate and delayed recall of performed cognitive activities was examined in 136 adults aged 20 to 85. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to assess the association between perceptual speed and age differences in activity memory. The age-related variance in delayed activity recall was reduced by 52% by the statistical control of perceptual speed, and the age-related variance in immediate activity recall was reduced by 91%. Thus, adult age differences in delayed and immediate activity memory were found to be associated with limitations in perceptual speed. The cognitive effort that is required to perform cognitive activities may tax the processing resources of older adults, prohibiting successful encoding of the activities.

Adult↗