Age Effects in Simple Prediction of a Repeating Binary Event Pattern
Alison J. S. Sanford, E. Ball · Gerontologia · 2009
An experiment is performed in which old and young Ss try to predict whether the digit Tor ‘2’ will occur on each of a long series of trials. The sequences of ‘I’s and ‘2’s were fixed, consisting of a repeated cycle, 1 1 2 1 1 2 etc. When Ss did not know there was a pattern, young and old Ss did not differ in the number of cycles it took to learn the sequence perfectly. This result accords with earlier results showing that young and old Ss did not differ in the number of trials taken to probability match in a similar situation. When Ss were previously cued that the sequence had a pattern, the young improved greatly but the old did not. The findings are discussed in terms of Griew’s [1965] concept of compensatory strategies, which makes a prediction not upheld in the present study.