Understanding a narrative situation depends on keeping track of multiple characters that enter and exit dynamically as the plot unfolds. We investigated age differences in this process during narrative comprehension. In Experiment 1, we used a probe recognition paradigm to examine the effect of age on the accessibility of a previous character when another character was subsequently introduced. ...

Stimuli related to an individual's knowledge/experience are often more memorable than abstract stimuli, particularly for older adults. This has been found when material that is congruent with knowledge is contrasted with material that is incongruent with knowledge, but there is little research on a possible graded effect of congruency. The present study manipulated the degree of congruency of s...

Adult age differences in cognitive plasticity have been studied less often in working memory than in episodic memory. The authors investigated the effects of extensive working memory practice on performance improvement, transfer, and short-term maintenance of practice gains and transfer effects. Adults age 20-30 years and 70-80 years practiced a spatial working memory task with 2 levels of proc...

The Color Stroop Test is consensually considered as a task to assess the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms. If the Stroop interference effect is largely undisputed, it is also acknowledged that the size of this effect varies as a function of various task manipulations, such as the task format. The aim of the present study was to compare the size of adult age-related differences in inhibition ...

The generalized divided differences are introduced. They are applied to investigate some properties characterizing generalized higher-order convexity. Among others some support-type property is proved.

P3 event-related potentials were recorded from 37 subjects in two age groups (19-25 and 61-75 years) listening to tones, stop + vowel (CV) monosyllables, and isolated vowels. P3 latencies were found to be significantly longer for older subjects in all stimulus conditions. CV latencies were also significantly longer than simple tone latencies with the increase being approximately 1.30 msec/year....

Older adults express greater prejudice than younger adults, but it is not clear why. In a community-based sample, we found that older White adults demonstrated more racial prejudice on an implicit measure, the race Implicit Association Test, than did younger adults. Process-dissociation procedures indicated that this difference in implicit prejudice was due to older adults having less control o...

Multiple-object tracking is the ability to attend (keep track of) the positions of multiple target items as they move among other items. The performance of young and older adults (M = 19 and 73 years old, respectively) was compared in two versions of a tracking task in which participants were required to monitor the positions of 1-4 moving targets in a field of 10 moving items. All participants...

Aging may have an impact on the CA3 autoassociative network of the hippocampus, posited by computational models as supporting pattern completion. Twenty-five young (YAs) and 25 older adults (OAs) performed a spatial pattern completion task using a computerized navigational paradigm analogous to a rodent pattern completion task reliant on the CA3. Participants identified a previously seen goal l...

Attention can be attracted faster by emotional relative to neutral information, and memory also can be strengthened for that emotional information. However, within visual scenes, often there is an advantage in memory for central emotional portions at the expense of memory for peripheral background information, called an emotion-induced memory trade-off. The authors examined how aging impacts th...