Age differences in memory for texts: Production deficiency or processing limitations?
Gillian M. Cohen · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1988
Studies of the effects of aging on memory for written and spoken texts have now accumulated to the point where a complex pattern of convergent and divergent results is apparent. Recent reviews have sought to make sense of this pattern and to identify the sources of the many discrepancies between different studies by analyzing the interactive relationships between attributes of the text, the learner, and the task (Hultsch & Dixon, 1984; Meyer & Rice, in press). The outcome of these reviews is that we are much better able to identify the circumstances in which old people are likely to remember texts less well than young people. We can identify the type of texts, the kind of people, and the kind of memory tasks that will, in combination, be most likely to exhibit an age-related deficit. But why does ability to remember information from texts decline in old age? Researchers are currently focused on finding a theoretical explanation that can illuminate the underlying causes of age-related changes. The explanations that are commonly put forward can be divided into two classes, those that attribute the deficits to faulty strategies (the production deficiency explanation) and those that attribute them to processing limitations (the processing capacity explanation). This chapter attempts to assess the power and scope of these explanations using two criteria: how far the theory generates predictions that are precise and unambiguous, and how far the empirical evidence conforms to the predictions.