During a critical period of postnatal age sensory experience has a profound effect on maturation of visual cortical wiring. Electrophysiological evidence is indicating a substantial effect of visual deprivation on the visual cortical response properties. In this study we evaluated effect of light deprivation during a limited time of postnatal age on two aspects of spatial (working and reference...

OBJECTIVES To investigate age differences in working memory processing, specifically the accuracy of retrieval of items stored outside the immediate focus of attention. METHODS Younger and older adults were tested on a modified N-Back task with probes presented in an unpredictable order (implying also that some trials necessitated a switch in the focus of attention and others that did not). ...

Immediate ordered memory for words in poor readers was compared with that of two control groups of normal readers, matched on chronological age and reading age, respectively. The groups were equated for basal memory capacity. Phonological similarity and word length were simultaneously manipulated. Items were presented either auditorily (spoken words) or visually (their corresponding drawings). ...

When skill acquisition involves a shift in strategy (such as from rule-based to retrieval-based processing), older adults typically shift later in practice than young adults do. We observed the shift from scanning-based to memory-based processing in a noun pair learning task. Young and older adults were trained in conditions in which the relationship between memory load and scanning load was ma...

Two studies examined age differences in recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. In Study 1, younger, middle-aged, and older adults were shown images on a computer screen and, after a distraction task, were asked first to recall as many as they could and then to identify previously shown images from a set of old and new ones. The relative number of negative ima...

Previous studies have indicated that older adults have a special deficit in the encoding and retrieval of associations. The current study assessed this deficit using ecologically valid name-face pairs. In two experiments, younger and older participants learned a series of name-face pairs under intentional and incidental learning instructions, respectively, and were then tested for their recogni...

Recent research has shown that by 30 months of age, children can successfully update their representation of an absent object's location on the basis of new verbal information, whereas 23-month-olds often return to the object's prior location. The current results show that this updating failure persisted even when (a) toddlers received visual and verbal information about the prior location but ...

We recently introduced a two-component model of the mechanisms underlying age differences in memory functioning across the lifespan. According to this model, memory performance is based on associative and strategic components. The associative component is relatively mature by middle childhood, whereas the strategic component shows a maturational lag and continues to develop until young adulthoo...

While it is well known that working memory functions decline with age, the functional reasons for this decline are not well understood. A factor that has proven critical for general individual differences in visual working memory capacity is the efficiency of filtering irrelevant information. Here, we examine to what degree this factor is also responsible for age differences in working memory. ...