Effet production et vieillissement : étude du rôle des traitements sémantiques spécifique et relationnel

Abstract

Summary : Aging and generation effect : specific and relational semantic processes in the generation effect. The present study was conducted to address the issue of cognitive processes involved in the generation effect and to explore the impact of aging on these processes. Three age groups (young, old and older subjects) were tested in two experiments. The first one was designed to investigate aging effects on specific and relational processing with or without inductor-word production tasks. In the second experiment, we intended to replicate results from experiment 1 by using instructions (during the learning phase) involve specific and relational processing supposed to be engagea in the generation task. The data showed that young adults can profit from both relational and specific semantic processing involved by the encoding task, whereas old adults only enhance their mnesic performances when the task engaged relational semantic processing. These results are discussed in terms of an age-related environmental deficit hypothesis. Key words : memory, aging, generetion effect, specifie and relational processing, environmental hypothesis.