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Biomedical subjects

L L Light

Publications and source records attributed to L L Light.

17 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Direct and indirect measures of memory for modality in young and older adults.

In 2 experiments, young and older adults demonstrated modality effects of similar magnitude in perceptual identification tasks. That is, both young and older adults demonstrated more repetition priming when study and test modalities matched than when they were different, suggesting that contextual information was equally available across age. However, when asked explicitly to retrieve modality information, older adults were less accurate than young adults. These results constitute evidence for a dissociation between direct and indirect measures of memory for modality information. They call into question hypotheses that memory impairment in old age is due to deficient encoding of contextual information and challenge current accounts of modality effects in repetition priming.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1991

Instantiation of general terms in young and older adults.

Instantiation of general terms in discourse requires inference from general world knowledge and use of linguistic context to particularize meaning. According to the semantic deficit hypothesis, older adults should be less likely than young adults to generate or to store such inferences. In Experiments 1 and 2 an indirect measure, relatedness judgment, was used to assess immediate comprehension and memory for inferences. In Experiment 3 a direct measure, cued recall, was used to tap memory for inferences. No age differences in immediate or delayed memory were observed in Experiments 1 or 2. In Experiment 3 older adults recalled fewer sentences, but there was no evidence for a specific decrement in storage of inferential material. Older adults are not impaired in ability to draw inferences based on general world knowledge, nor are they more likely than young adults to encode linguistic information in a general, stereotypic fashion.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Direct and indirect tests of memory for category exemplars in young and older adults.

Young and older adults were compared on direct (cued recall) and indirect (exemplar generation) tests of memory for category members. Because category names served as cues in both tasks, amount of retrieval support was constant across tasks. Although older adults produced fewer category members in cued recall, priming of category exemplars in the generation task did not vary with age. These results suggest that age constancy in priming tasks does not depend on physical similarity between study materials and retrieval cues provided at test and point to the importance of deliberate recollection as a factor in determining the extent of age differences in memory.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

Young and older adults' use of context in spatial memory.

We evaluated the hypothesis that older adults remember spatial information less well than younger adults because they use contextual information less effectively. Young and older adults studied schematic town maps on which structures were presented either simultaneously or successively and on which a network of streets was either present or absent. However, age did not interact with either contextual variable. Thus, we conclude that age differences in spatial memory do not arise from differences in the use of context.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Implicit and explicit memory in young and older adults.

In three experiments, young and older adults were compared on both implicit and explicit memory tasks. The size of repetition priming effects in word completion and in perceptual identification tasks did not differ reliably across ages. However, age-related decrements in performance were obtained in free recall, cued recall, and recognition. These results, similar to those observed in amnesics, suggest that older adults are impaired on tasks which require conscious recollection but that memory which depends on automatic activation processes in relatively unaffected by age.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Dissociation of memory and awareness in young and older adults.

Young (mean age = 23.41 years) and older (mean age = 69.41 years) adults studied a list of 80 words. They were tested immediately and 7 days later for both yes/no recognition and for ability to complete fragments such as E D L M, with words, some of which had been studied previously. The fragment completion task was not described as a memory test and subjects were encouraged to respond to all word fragments. Younger adults scored higher on recognition than older adults but not on fragment completion. These results, similar to those obtained with amnesics, suggest that older adults are impaired on tasks which require a conscious effort to recognize an event but that memory without awareness is unaffected by age.

Adult↗
PubMed1985

Working-memory capacity, age, and memory for discourse.

Two experiments explored the issue of whether age-related differences in memory for discourse can be explained by age-related differences in working memory capacity. Young and older adults were given a series of tasks designed to measure working memory capacity and memory for paragraphs. Although age-related differences were observed on digit, word, and sentence spans as well as on recall (Experiment 1) and recognition (Experiment 2), retention was not predicted well by scores on any of the span measures for either young or older adults in either experiment. The implications of these findings for hypotheses that age-related declines in working memory are responsible for problems in memory for prose are considered.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Recognition memory for typical and unusual faces.

In four studies, recognition memory for faces rated as similar to a prototype was found to be inferior to memory for faces rated as unusual in appearance. This result was obtained under both incidental and intentional learning conditions, at presentation rates ranging from 3 to 15 sec, and with retention intervals from 3 to 24 hr. A fifth experiment established interitem similarity as the structural basis of this typicality effect in recognition memory. Difficulties in interpreting the findings in terms of some current models for classification learning, depth of processing models, or present models of the word frequency effect are discussed.

Attention↗
PubMed1976

Are there long-term "literal copies" of visually presented words?

Evidence for the hypothesis that the appearance of visually presented words is stored in "literal copy" form is critically evaluated and shown to be inconclusive. An experiment in which students were required to retain information about zero, one, or two visual properties of words is reported. A strong version of the literal-copy hypothesis predicts that retention of both case and color should be equally good under instructions to remember one of these attributes and instructions to remember both. However, the results were inconsistent with predictions from this hypothesis. A model that assumes that each visual attribute is stored independently in abstract propositional form provided a good quantitative fit to the data.

Color Perception↗
PubMed1975

Trade-off between memory for verbal items and their visual attributes.

Instructions to attend to the case and color in which words were presented led to improved retention of these visual attributes but depressed recognition performance. This trade-off between item and attribute memory occurred at three presentation rates (1.5, 5.5, and 10.5 sec/item), suggesting that visual attributes of verbal stimuli are rarely stored unless subjects expect that knowledge of physical form will be useful later. Visual attributes of high-imagery words were retained better than visual attributes of low imagery words by subjects instructed to attend to case and color, but not by subjects asked only to attend to word meaning. Implications of these findings for the hypothesis that visually presented verbal stimuli are stored as literal copies are discussed.

Color Perception↗