Abstract
Two groups of subjects, adults in their 30s and 60s, learned a set of paired associates and then recalled the second member of each pair on seeing the first over the course of many trials. There were marked effects of practice and of age, but no interaction between those two variables. The older subjects’ performance did not decline disproportionately after a 2-week retention interval. After extensive practice, the younger subjects took almost the same amount of time to name a word’s associate as to name the word itself, while the older subjects took markedly longer to name a word’s associate than to read the word aloud. This seemingly irreducible difference in latencies is attributed to less efficient retrieval from memory by the older subjects.
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This work was supported by the Social Science Research Council (U.K.). Subhash Vyas gathered the data: he and Robin Barr helped analyze them. Burton Rosner made many useful suggestions.
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Waugh, N.C. Acquisition and retention of a verbal habit in early and late adulthood. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 23, 437–439 (1985). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329845
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329845