Suffix effects, coding assessments, and intrusion errors in young and elderly subjects.
Item
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Title
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Suffix effects, coding assessments, and intrusion errors in young and elderly subjects.
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Identifier
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AAI9405531
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identifier
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9405531
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Creator
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Greenhut-Wertz, Joan M.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Susan K. Manning
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Experimental | Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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Five studies were conducted to investigate potential age differences in encoding, selective attention, and response inhibition in normal young and normal elderly college students. Three paradigms were employed. One attempted to evaluate the degree to which elderly subjects were able to exclude an extra item (a suffix) from the encoding and recall processes in immediate ordered recall. Another paradigm allowed the study of serial recall of phonologically similar and distinctive letters. In one condition, subvocal rehearsal was prevented by means of articulatory suppression, i.e. repeating the word "the" throughout the task. A final set of studies required subjects to make similarity judgements of letter pairs which were either phonologically or visually similar, in order to assess the degree of phonological coding employed. Again, in one condition, articulation was suppressed. Despite similar letter spans, serial recall was more difficult for the elderly than for the young. In some cases, auditory suffix interference was greater for the elderly than for young, and the elderly appeared to have been more susceptible to a small degree of visual suffix interference than were the young. The elderly were less able to exclude the suffix from the response set than were the young, and made a greater number of intrusion errors, both suffix and extra-list, in all of the recall paradigms. The extra-list intrusion errors were phonological/alphabetic order in nature, suggesting that the elderly may experience task competitive, internally generated "noise", which enters the response set. Thus, an attentional type of deficit in terms of ineffective response inhibition on the part of the elderly is implied. The data derived from articulatory suppression during immediate serial recall suggest that elderly subjects depend more upon articulatory processes than do young. However, when articulation was suppressed in the similarity judgements studies, elderly subjects' reaction times showed a significant improvement, suggesting that the process of suppressing articulation, may have helped "boost the signal" and focused attention in the elderly subjects.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
