Age differences in verbal short-term memory and the process of redintegration

Abstract

This study explored age related differences in short term memory, specifically the process of redintegration. Redintegration was uniquely defined by examining the word length effect and associative word pairs. Twenty younger adults and twenty older adults were instructed to remember short lists of words in eight different recall conditions which varied in level of difficulty. Task difficulty was defined using the following variables: irrelevant speech, presentation rate (1 vs. 2 seconds), and recall condition (immediate vs. delayed). Findings revealed recall was higher for younger adults compared with older adults in all recall conditions. Furthermore, as the difficulty of the memory task increased, strong redintegrative effects were observed for word length and associative word pairs for both the younger and older adults. Meaning, short words were better remembered than long words and associative word pairs were better remembered than unrelated word pairs.