Biomedical subjects

Alan W Kersten

Publications and source records attributed to Alan W Kersten.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Aging and memory for self-performed tasks: effects of task difficulty and time pressure.

An increase in task difficulty or time pressure during the performance of cognitive tasks decreased the ability of older adults to recall the tasks. In Experiments 1 and 2, adult age differences in recall of cognitive tasks were smaller for easier than for more difficult tasks, and, in Experiment 3, adult age differences were smaller for recall of cognitive tasks without time pressure than for recall of cognitive tasks with time pressure. During difficult or time-pressured cognitive tasks, older adults may become anxious about their performance, and they may have trouble inhibiting negative self-evaluative thoughts about their performance. Older adults may thus devote less attention to aspects of the cognitive tasks that would be beneficial for task recall.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Semantic context influences memory for verbs more than memory for nouns.

Three experiments revealed that memory for verbs is more dependent on semantic context than is memory for nouns. The participants in Experiment 1 were asked to remember either nouns or verbs from intransitive sentences. A recognition test included verbatim sentences, sentences with an old noun and a new verb, sentences with an old verb and a new noun, and entirely new sentences. Memory for verbs was significantly better when the verb was presented with the same noun at encoding and at retrieval. This contextual effect was much smaller for nouns. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated this effect and provided evidence that context effects reflect facilitation from bringing to mind the same meaning of a verb at encoding and at retrieval. Memory for verbs may be more dependent on semantic context because the meanings of verbs are more variable across semantic contexts than are the meanings of nouns.

Humans↗

PubMed2002

Directed forgetting of actions by younger and older adults.

Memory for actions that are performed is substantially better than memory for descriptions of actions (e.g., Earles, 1996). In fact, people may form memories for actions even if they do not intend to or want to remember them. The directed forgetting paradigm was used to test the ability of younger and older adults to intentionally forget simple actions (also known as subject-performed tasks, or SPTs). Participants were asked to perform the action described by a verb-noun pair (e.g., break toothpick) or to read the pair, but not to perform the action. Following each pair, the participants were told either to remember or to forget the pair. Younger adults intentionally forgot verbally encoded pairs significantly better than did older adults. Actions that were performed, however, were difficult for both younger and older adults to intentionally forget. The performance of an action thus seems to result in strong item-specific processing that makes the action difficult to intentionally forget even for younger adults who can successfully intentionally forget verbally encoded items.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Attention to novel objects during verb learning.

Three experiments provided evidence that 3.5- to 4-year-old English-speaking children (N = 72) attend to the appearances of novel objects, not only when they hear a novel noun, but also when they hear a novel verb. Children learning nouns in the context of novel, moving objects attended exclusively to the appearances of objects, even though nouns were also related to the motions of those objects. Children learning verbs attended equally to the appearances of objects and their motions. The latter result contrasted with the results from adults (N = 20), who focused more strongly on motions than on the appearances of objects when learning verbs. When familiar objects were instead employed, child verb learners attended more to motions than to the appearances of objects. Children may attend to novel objects during verb learning because knowledge of an object may be prerequisite to understanding what a verb means in the context of that object.

Adult↗