The Influence Of Knowledge Aquired At Study On Younger And Older Adults' Source Memory

Abstract

The current experiments were intended to investigate the tendency of younger and older adults to use knowledge acquired during encoding to guide source memory judgments at test. Participants studied a list of words with each word belonging to one of four categories. Each category, and the words chosen for that category, were assigned to a corner of the computer screen which contained one of four mathematical probability structures, 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25%, reflecting how many exemplars from a given category was to be presented in it. Both older and younger adults learned and later used the probability structure to guide source memory judgments. Additionally, Experiment 1 observed that dividing the attention of younger adults hindered their ability to do this. Experiment 2 found that the implementation of this new knowledge appears to be automatic considering that requiring younger adults to respond quickly did not hinder their ability to infer a word's source based on the probability structure.