We report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.g., "Did Anna dress the baby?"). The manipulation of several factors expected to influence t...

Using a new method for studying the development of false-memory formation, we examined developmental differences in the rates at which 6-, 7-, 9-, 10-, and 18-year-olds made two types of memory errors: backward causal-inference errors (i.e. falsely remembering having viewed the non-viewed cause of a previously viewed effect), and gap-filling errors (i.e. falsely remembering having viewed a scri...

Imagination as a cause of memory distortion has generated much recent interest. Researchers have demonstrated that memories for both childhood events and more recent actions are influenced by imagination (Garry, Manning, Loftus, & Sherman, 1996; Goff & Roediger, 1998). Typically, confidence in the occurrence of fictitious events increases after those events have been imagined— a phenomenon call...

195 It is well known that in humans, significant changes in cognitive function, postural control and motor coordination appear with age /1/. Age-related memory decline has been described in non-human primates/2/as well as age differences in activity patterns/3/. To obtain a better understanding of age-associated changes in these functions, we have begun studies that include: assessment of visua...

This study compared the relative importance (i.e., proportion of shared variance) of attentional capacity and processing speed accounts of cognitive aging to predict age differences in episodic and working memory performance. Right-handed adults (n = 100), 18 to 88 years of age, completed measures of attentional capacity (divided attention), processing speed, and episodic and working memory. Th...

Working memory mediates the short-term maintenance of information. Virtually all empirical research on working memory involves investigations of working memory for verbal and visual information. Whereas aging is typically associated with a deficit in working memory for these types of information, recent findings suggestive of relatively well-preserved long-term memory for emotional information ...

In 2 experiments, the advantages of placing automatic and consciously controlled memory processes in opposition to study age-related declines in memory performance were examined. Drawing on the common memory failure of mistakenly repeating oneself, a task was designed in which participants had to rely on conscious memory (recollection) to avoid repetition errors. Recollection proved to be sever...

The study examined whether test awareness contributes to age effects in priming. Younger and older adults were given two priming tests (word-stem completion and category production). Awareness was assessed using both a standard post-test questionnaire and an on-line measure. Results from the on-line awareness condition showed that, relative to older adults, younger adults showed higher levels o...

In previous studies of memory span, participants have attended to the stimuli while they were presented, and therefore have had the opportunity to use a variety of mnemonic strategies. In the main portion of the present study, participants (first- and fourth-grade children, and adults; 24 per age group) carried out a visual task while hearing lists of spoken digits and received a post-list digi...

Five experiments were conducted to investigate the mechanisms by which age-related reductions in working memory capacity might mediate age-related declines in cognitive functioning. A prototypical cognitive task, cube comparison, was implemented on a computer to allow measures of the availability of different types of information while subjects were attempting to solve the task. Young and old a...