Biomedical subjects

Julie L Earles

Publications and source records attributed to Julie L Earles.

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

Gaze aversion: spared inhibition for visual distraction in older adults.

Our everyday environment is filled with irrelevant and potentially distracting information. Recent research has shown that during retrieval people tend to look away from distraction or close their eyes and that averting one's gaze benefits retrieval. We examined the extent to which there are age-related differences in the benefits of gaze aversion and whether the benefits of gaze aversion extend to encoding. Relative to looking at complex stimuli, closing the eyes and looking at simple stimuli produced reliable improvements in memory for both younger and older adults at both encoding and retrieval. Contrary to the expectation that older adults have general inhibitory deficits, the benefits of gaze aversion were similar for younger and older adults at both encoding and retrieval. These results are consistent with the view that older adults have spared inhibitory functioning for distraction appearing in fixed locations.

Adolescent↗

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↗