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The Role Of Encoding Strategy In Younger And Older Adult Associative Recognition: A Think-Aloud Analysis, Mark C. Fox, Zachary Baldock, Sara P. Freeman, Jane M. Berry

Psychology Faculty Publications

Older adults have especially poor recognition memory for word pairs, and recent research suggests this associative deficit manifests primarily in older adults’ higher rates of false alarms compared to younger adults. This could result from older adults either failing to generate meaningful (deep) mediators at study, or failing to benefit from having generated deep mediators at test. Younger and older adults performed a recognition memory task for words and word-pairs. A think-aloud analysis of their spontaneous encoding strategies (e.g., repetition, shallow mediators, and deep mediators) revealed that generation of deep mediators did not differ between younger and older adults, and …