Abstract
To further investigate the relationship between age and multitrial free recall of categorized lists, 144 subjects learned a categorized word list for five trials. The basic design was a 2 × 3 factorial combination of list length (32 or 64 words) and age (young, middle-aged, and elderly). Both list lengths were composed of eight categories, with either four or eight instances per category. Lists were presented for five alternate study-test trials, and after a 20-min filler task a final recall trial was administered. Overall, young subjects recalled more words than did either middle-aged or elderly subjects, but the two older groups did not differ. Follow-up analyses of the significant age × list length interaction indicated that there were significant age differences only on the long list. While there were systematic age-related differences in recall, there were no parallel differences in clustering, indicating that although elderly subjects do use category-organization strategies during encoding, they do not benefit as much from those strategies as do younger subjects.
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This experiment was conducted as part of the first author’s master’s thesis. Financial support for the study was provided by a grant from the Marie Wilson Howells Fund.
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Brown-Whistler, S., Freund, J.S. Age differences in free recall and clustering as a function of list length and trials. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 31, 7–10 (1993). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334124
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334124