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Biomedical subjects

J S Saults

Publications and source records attributed to J S Saults.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Persistence of memory for ignored lists of digits: areas of developmental constancy and change.

Contrary to the common belief that sensory memory remains unchanged across development in childhood, there have been several previous reports suggesting that the persistence of sensory memory, at least for sounds, increases with age in childhood. Because those previous studies all used isolated sounds as stimuli, it is not yet clear how this developmental difference influences the recall of sound series. The present study adapts the procedure of J. S. Saults and N. Cowan (1996), who studied memory for attended and ignored spoken words, to examine here the recall of attended and ignored lists of digit. A developmental increase in the persistence of memory was obtained only for the final item in an ignored list, which is the item for which sensory memory is thought to be the most vivid at short retention intervals.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

The development of memory for ignored speech.

Previous studies of the development of children's memory have focused on attended stimuli. Here we examine short-term memory for spoken words that were ignored at the time of their presentation. In Experiment 1, a visual matching task was interrupted occasionally by a set of picture alternatives. The participant was to select the picture matching the most recently heard word, which had been presented 1, 5, or 10 s ago. An age difference in memory was found, but performance levels were quite high. Experiment 2 employed an alternative visual task to tie up phonological processing, bringing performance levels down to a more sensitive range. An age difference in the persistence of memory was obtained under these circumstances. We conclude that relatively attention-free properties of short-term memory may change with development in childhood.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1995

Can auditory memory for tone pitch be rehearsed?

This study investigated whether nonverbal auditory memory representations can be affected by rehearsal strategies. The comparison of the pitches of 2 tones separated by a silent, variable delay interval was examined in 2 experiments, both when participants were instructed to rehearse the pitch of the first tone covertly during the intertone interval and when such rehearsal was prevented by 1 of 2 attention-demanding distractor tasks. In both experiments, delayed tone comparison performance was superior when participants were permitted to rehearse, and the type of distractor task (verbal vs. auditory) had no effect on performance under distraction instructions. The results suggest that auditory imagery can be used strategically to slow the rate of decay of auditory information for tone pitch.

Female↗
PubMed1991

Enhancement of 4-year-old children's memory span for phonologically similar and dissimilar word lists.

Previous research suggests that preschool children are deficient in rehearsal and that stimulus list repetitions can improve their recall, presumably by substituting for the products of rehearsal. However, the previous research included interitem or postlist retention intervals of several seconds or more. We examined the utility of list repetitions with reference to an ordinary span task in which spoken words were presented 1 s apart for immediate recall. Lists with phonologically similar versus dissimilar items were included, to determine if the overall pattern of recall could be made more similar to what is ordinarily obtained in older children. Cumulative repetition was found to cause a moderate increase in both memory span and the phonological similarity effect. Other types of list repetition provided more insight into types of stimulus redundancy that were helpful (e.g., repeated serial order information) or not helpful (e.g., forced articulatory coding) to children attempting to recall spoken lists. The underlying mnemonic processes are discussed.

Child Development↗
PubMed1990

Age, self-assessed health status, and cognition.

Data from a recent project involving 362 adults ranging from 20 to 79 years of age were reanalyzed to examine the effects of statistical control of self-assessed health status on the age trends in several measures of cognitive functioning. The major result was that the age trends were virtually identical with, and without, control of the health-status variable. Implications of the views that the lack of health influences was due to a narrow range of health status or to insensitive assessment of health status were discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Investigation of student status, background variables, and feasibility of standard tasks in cognitive aging research.

Data are reported on a variety of cognitive tasks from 62 college students and 362 nonstudent adults between 20 and 79 years of age. The goals of the project were as follows: (a) to investigate the validity of the practices of using college students and adults over age 65 in studies of cognitive aging, (b) to examine the influence of a variety of background variables on age trends in cognitive performance, and (c) to initiate the development of standard tasks to assist in the description of subject samples in cognitive aging research. The age trends in cognitive performance were relatively independent of an assortment of background variables, but because college students were atypical of their age group in several performance measures they may be suspect as the young-adult control subjects in investigations involving these types of measures. Adults over the age of about 65 appear to exhibit accelerated slowing of speeded performance, but in other respects perform about as one would expect on the basis of the age trends observed between the ages of 20 and 65.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Utilization of path-analytic procedures to investigate the role of processing resources in cognitive aging.

Data from two batteries of tests administered to 129 and 233 adults, ranging from 20 to 79 years of age, were analyzed to explore the viability of models postulating that age differences in the quantity or efficiency of processing resources are responsible for many of the age differences observed in cognitive functioning. Path-analysis procedures were used to estimate the direct and indirect, or resource-mediated, effects of age on cognitive performance. Results, with simple speed and memory measures serving as the indexes of processing resources, indicated that there was little support for a strong resource model, and evidence derived from a weak resource model suggested that resource-mediated contributions to age differences are small, relative to those not mediated by processing resources.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Temporal memory over the adult lifespan.

Performances of noncollege student young adults, middle-aged adults, and elderly adults were contrasted on word temporal memory and paired-associate learning tasks. A comparison group of college-student subjects was also evaluated on each task. Significant effects for age variation were found for each task. The age sensitivity for temporal memory conflicts with one of the criteria commonly established for determining the automaticity of a memory task. In addition, moderately high positive correlations were found for each age group between word temporal memory scores and paired-associate learning scores, implying the involvement of effortful processes over the adult lifespan in word temporal memory.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Frequency-of-occurrence memory over the adult lifespan.

As part of a large scale normative study involving a number of cognitive tasks, 233 subjects, all noncollege students ranging in age from 20 to 79 years, performed two frequency judgment tasks. A modest, but statistically significant, age-related deficit was found, with the decrement in proficiency being largest from middle to late adulthood.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The role of attention in the development of short-term memory: age differences in the verbal span of apprehension.

In previous studies of memory span, participants have attended to the stimuli while they were presented, and therefore have had the opportunity to use a variety of mnemonic strategies. In the main portion of the present study, participants (first- and fourth-grade children, and adults; 24 per age group) carried out a visual task while hearing lists of spoken digits and received a post-list digit recall cue only occasionally, for some lists. Under these conditions, list information presumably must be extracted from a passively held store such as auditory sensory memory. The results suggest that each individual has a core memory capacity limit that can be observed clearly in circumstances in which it cannot be supplemented by mnemonic strategies, and that the capacity limit appears to increase with age during childhood. Other, attention-demanding processes also contribute to memory for attended lists.

Age Factors↗