Age differences in free recall and clustering as a function of list length and trials

Abstract

To further investigate the relationship between age and multitrial free recall of categorized lists, 144 subjects learned a categorized word list for five trials. The basic design was a 2 × 3 factorial combination of list length (32 or 64 words) and age (young, middle-aged, and elderly). Both list lengths were composed of eight categories, with either four or eight instances per category. Lists were presented for five alternate study-test trials, and after a 20-min filler task a final recall trial was administered. Overall, young subjects recalled more words than did either middle-aged or elderly subjects, but the two older groups did not differ. Follow-up analyses of the significant age × list length interaction indicated that there were significant age differences only on the long list. While there were systematic age-related differences in recall, there were no parallel differences in clustering, indicating that although elderly subjects do use category-organization strategies during encoding, they do not benefit as much from those strategies as do younger subjects.