This study reports two mental multiplication experiments that were designed to measure age differences in central and peripheral processes. Experiment 1 varied task type (verification vs production), and Experiment 2 varied exposure duration (presentation until response, 600 ms, and 300 ms) on a production task. Neither experiment showed evidence of age differences in central processes (e.g., r...

In two experiments, we examined age differences in collaborative inhibition (reduced recall in pairs of people, relative to pooled individuals) across repeated retrieval attempts. Younger and older adults studied categorized word lists and were then given two consecutive recall tests and a recognition test. On the first recall test, the subjects were given free-report cued recall or forced-repo...

Three experiments examined developmental change in children's understanding of regret and relief, two second-order emotions whose quality depends on a comparison between reality and "what might have been." In Experiment 1, participants 7 years of age and older, but not 5-year-olds, made regret-related emotion-response judgments that took into account a comparison of reality with its alternative...

In young adults, having a relatively long time perspective has been associated with a more abstract, holistic approach to cognitive tasks, as opposed to the more concrete, detailed approach associated with having a more limited or near-future focus ( Trope & Liberman, 2003). Here we studied the impact of age differences in temporal perspective on performance on a classic visual attention task (...

The authors examined how age differences in strategy selection are related to associative learning deficits and metacognitive variables, including memory ability confidence. In Experiment 1, increases in memory reliance for performance of the noun-pair lookup task were compared with increases in noun-pair memory ability. In Experiment 2, memory reliance was assessed for noun pairs memorized pri...

Contributions of self-reported health to adult age differences in perceptual speed and memory were assessed for 301 adults ages 20-90. Participants were asked 4 health status questions, given 3 perceptual speed tests, 2 working memory tests, and 2 memory tests. Self-reported health was found to predict speed better than it predicted memory. Covariance structural equation modeling was used to as...

Three studies investigated (a) the plausibility of the claim that increasing the processing demands in a memory task contributes to greater involvement of a central processor and (b) the effects of altering reliance on the central processor on the magnitude of age-related differences in working-memory tasks. In the first study, young adults performed versions of 2 tasks presumed to vary in the ...

We investigated the hypothesis that age differences in speech discrimination would be reduced by enhancing the distinctiveness of the speech processing event in terms of both the context of encoding and the response outcome. Younger and older adults performed an auditory lexical decision task in which the degree of semantic constraint (context) and type of feedback were manipulated. Main effect...

Tasks assessing theory of mind (ToM) and non-mental state control tasks were administered to young and older adults to examine previous contradictory findings about age differences in mental state decoding. Age differences were found on a verbal ToM task after controlling for vocabulary levels. Older adults achieved significantly lower scores than did younger adults on static and dynamic visual...

The present studies were designed to examine age differences in memory when attention was divided during encoding, retrieval, or at both times. In Experiment 1, Ss studied categorized words while performing a number-monitoring task during encoding, retrieval, or at both times. Older Ss' free recall and clustering performance declined more than that of young Ss when attention was divided at enco...