It is of critical importance to understand the conditions that enhance memory performance in the elderly. Recent studies have demonstrated that imageric and relational information interact to influence memory performance differently in young and elderly adults. When the visual distinctiveness of items and cues in certain memory tasks is augmented, this increased imageric information may enhance the memory performance of elderly individuals significantly, in some experiments to the same levels exhibited by young adults. Increased relational information, (e.g., the category structure of stimulus sets) may also have positive effects on recall. However, several experiments have shown that the same relational and imageric cues which augment recall in young adults may actually diminish recall performance in elderly adults. Different combinations of imageric and relational information may produce widely different performance outcomes for young and elderly adults; some informational conditions are associated with identical levels of recall for young and elderly, whereas others may produce spurious """"""""age differences"""""""" which can be entirely ameliorated through the use of appropriate experimental tasks. It is argued that these effects are predictable, and may be united, explained, and extended within the item- specific/relational information theory of Hunt and colleagues, and the environmental support hypothesis of Craik. It is suggested that these patterns of findings reflect age differences in the need to reduce mental effort at retrieval, and the use by young and elderly adults of different types of information in different ways to accomplish this end. Experiments are proposed to investigate the effects of specific combinations of relational and imageric factors on memory performance across the adult lifespan, and to demonstrate the predictability of these effects within the theoretical frameworks employed, as well as the degree to which these frameworks unite and explain these findings. The proposed work will employ established methods in spatial and nonspatial memory to investigate memory for contextual imageric information, item-specific imageric information, and relational information, in young, elderly, and """"""""old old"""""""" adults. This research will specifically address the types and levels of imageric and relational information that are maximally facilitative of memory in the elderly.
| Sharps, M J (1997) Category superiority effects in young and elderly adults. J Genet Psychol 158:165-71 |
| Sharps, M J; Price-Sharps, J L (1996) Visual memory support: an effective mnemonic device for older adults. Gerontologist 36:706-8 |
