Psychology and Aging最新文献

Older adults have impaired episodic memory abilities, but they can remember high-value information just as well as young adults and exhibit improved performance on memory-based tasks via cognitive offloading. For young adults, benefits from offloading a subset of memoranda (i.e., partial offloading) stem from both using the external memory aid to access offloaded information and better memory for nonoffloaded information, termed the saving-enhanced memory effect. Whether older adults also exhibit a saving-enhanced memory benefit from offloading is not yet known. The present study investigated if and how young and older adults' partial cognitive offloading behaviors and the benefits conferred by partial offloading change following experience with this strategy. Across two experiments, participants studied lists of words associated with varying point values under both internal memory and partial offloading conditions with the goal of earning as many points as possible on a subsequent free recall test. Participants chose a subset of words to offload before and after receiving three trials of direct instruction (Experiment 1) or extended practice (Experiment 2) using partial offloading. Across experiments, experience with partial offloading improved overall performance for both young and older adults. However, even after acquiring experience using partial offloading, young adults, but not older adults, exhibited better memory for nonsaved items, akin to the saving-enhanced memory effect. Thus, older adults benefitted from the use of an external memory aid, but internal memory resources freed up by offloading were not effectively rededicated to remembering nonoffloaded information as has been observed in young adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Age-related impairments in selective listening may result from a mixture of cognitive and sensory factors. This study used a task-switching variant of selective listening and compared performance of 47 younger and 47 older adults to investigate auditory attention switching and target-distractor segregation across two experimental sessions. In each session, participants also completed a pure-tone audiometry to assess hearing capacity. In each experimental trial, two words were played from separate locations. Guided by visual cues, participants categorized the target speech at the cued location while ignoring the distractor speech. Results revealed robust age-related slowing. Both groups showed performance costs when the target location switched across sequential trials (i.e., switch costs). However, even after accounting for individual differences in hearing capacity, older adults exhibited greater switch costs, suggesting an age-related deficit in cognitive control. Moreover, while younger adults showed reduced switch costs across sessions, older adults showed little to no decrease, indicating constrained adaptation to flexible task demands. Furthermore, age-related differences in the congruency effect (i.e., reflecting target-distractor segregation) emerged primarily during switch trials, driven by older adults' increased distractor interference under conditions requiring attention switching. Although in the error rates switching auditory attention may be partially compromised by nonpathological levels of hearing loss, sensory decline alone could not fully account for the age-related performance differences observed in our cued selective listening task, likely reflecting deficits in cognitive control of attention. Together, these findings underscore the impact of cognitive factors on older adults' ability to switch auditory attention and segregate competing auditory information independent of age-related sensory differences in hearing capacity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Memory improves when encoding and retrieval occur in the same context-a phenomenon known as the context reinstatement (CR) effect. CR is well established in younger adults (Smith & Vela, 2001), yet it remains unclear whether older adults benefit from contextual support as effectively. Addressing this question, this meta-analysis synthesized findings from 22 articles (33 studies, 106 effect sizes, N = 2,177) comparing CR effects in younger and older adults across various types of contexts, encoding instructions, and memory paradigms, thereby extending the previous review by Smith and Vela (2001). Overall, CR reliably enhanced memory in both age groups (Hedges' g = 0.32), with no age-related difference in effect size. This comparable benefit held despite 72% of primary studies reporting typical age-related declines in memory. This suggests that older adults retain the ability to encode and retrieve item-context associations when strategic retrieval demands are minimized, aligning with the environmental support hypothesis (Craik, 1983) and challenging a strict interpretation of the associative deficit hypothesis (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). Moderator analyses indicated that CR effects were overall weaker when item pairs with associative instructions were encoded, compared to single items. Furthermore, CR effects tended to reduce when switched contexts were familiar, rather than novel at retrieval. No age-specific moderation was found. However, a lack of variation of encoding demands, context types, and memory tests across empirical studies limited statistical power for such moderator analyses. Overall, more research is needed to systematically examine potential conditions under which age differences in CR may emerge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Older age is characterized by attenuated episodic memory but intact semantic memory. At the same time, online semantic processing, particularly the prediction of lexical information, is attenuated, as reflected by a smaller event-related potential N400 effect for expected versus unexpected items. Previous research focused on semantic processing of verbal materials. However, we aimed at investigating not only age-related differences in the semantic processing of pictorial materials but also the relationship between such age-related differences and associative memory performance. Using picture pairs, we investigated whether age-related differences in online semantic processing, as manifested in the N400, are reflected in a behavioral measure of semantic processing (i.e., perceived semantic congruency) and, in addition, transfer to associative episodic memory. Younger and older adults studied sequentially presented object pairs with and without semantic relationships (e.g., a bathtub followed by a rubber duck, or a pillow followed by a punch, respectively). Their task was to judge the object pairs' semantic congruency. Thereafter, an associative memory test was conducted, in which participants had to discriminate between intact, recombined, and new object pairs. In the study phase, younger adults showed the expected N400 attenuation effect for semantically related pairs. For older adults, this effect was reduced, even though there was no difference between both age groups either in the magnitude of the semantic congruency judgments or in the behavioral congruency effect. Furthermore, both age groups showed highly similar benefits for semantically related pairs in the ensuing associative memory test. In conclusion, older adults seem to rely more on bottom-up stimulus-driven integrative processes instead of applying top-down predictive processes initiated by preactivated semantic knowledge. Furthermore, older adults' online semantic processing seems to be decoupled from the processing that results in associative memory benefit from semantic relations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Although there is a consensus about age-related impairments in true memory, the relationship between aging and false memory remains less clear. Both the fuzzy-trace theory and the activation-monitoring theory postulate possible effects of cognitive aging on the processes of encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Yet, quantitative analyses of cognitive aging, both healthy (younger vs. older adults) and pathological (older adults vs. mild cognitive impairment/Alzheimer's disease), on false memory have not been conducted. We meta-analyzed 150 articles with 414 independent effect sizes and found a robust aging effect of false memory, with older adults showing higher levels of false memory than younger adults in both spontaneous (Hedges's g = 0.538, 95% CI [0.432, 0.644]) and suggestion-induced false memory (Hedges's g = 0.460, 95% CI [0.255, 0.665]). Mild cognitive impairment/Alzheimer's disease patients showed significantly higher levels of spontaneous (Hedges's g = 0.486, 95% CI [0.053, 0.919]) but not suggestion-induced false memory (Hedges's g = 0.608, 95% CI [-0.286, 1.502]) than healthy older adults. For the study and test phase, moderator analyses indicated that experimental material, modality, true memory, paradigm, type of test, and the retention interval significantly influenced aging effect on false memory. For general moderators, participants' age and education level were also significant. Our results underscore the importance of integrating the fuzzy-trace theory and activation-monitoring theory to account for age differences in false memory across types. Both healthy and pathological cognitive aging increase susceptibility to false memory, and the decline in verbatim memory and monitoring functions, combined with hyperactivation during encoding, may account for aging effect in false memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Considerable research concerning the multidirectionality of cognitive aging indicates that retrieving factual knowledge from semantic long-term memory (LTM) remains stable in healthy older age despite declines in actively maintaining information in working memory (WM). This study addressed how older adults' extensive acquired knowledge may support WM by mitigating age deficits in the speed of establishing bindings in WM (Block 1) or through greater contributions from LTM (Block 2). Younger novices (N = 38; M_age = 23.63, SD = 5.49), older novices (N = 56; M_age = 69.55, SD = 5.48), and older experts (N = 26; M_age = 66.96, SD = 5.41) in birding completed two blocks of a WM binding task that presented images of birds paired with words (e.g., robin-mudflat; pigeon-quick) for an immediate test of each bird (e.g., robin) with three options: the target (e.g., mudflat), a lure from the trial but not paired with that bird (e.g., quick), and a new-to-block distractor. Block 1 showed that older experts were just as slow as older novices when adapting the presentation rate of the pairs to achieve similar accuracy performance, regardless of the expertise-relevance of the stimuli (i.e., intact normal birds vs. scrambled meaningless birds). However, in Block 2, older experts exhibited an advantage to model parameter estimates of binding memory, but only when LTM was reliable (i.e., under no but not high proactive interference). Thus, rather than faster WM binding, expertise in healthy older age may confer benefits by outsourcing the demands of WM storage to LTM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

General event knowledge can be rapidly used during language comprehension and shapes word understanding. However, little is known about how event knowledge use might be affected by normal aging, which is associated with increases in world knowledge but decreases in fluid abilities. We measured event-related brain potentials, focusing on N400 potentials (neuroelectric markers of semantic processing) and post-N400 late positive complexes, as younger (aged 18-30; N = 24) and older (aged 53-80; N = 30) adult participants read short descriptions of real-world scenarios ending with the most predictable word or one of two types of contextually anomalous words, either related or unrelated to the event being described. For young adults, as previously reported (Metusalem et al., 2012), N400s were reduced to predictable compared to anomalous words and, among anomalous words, were reduced for those related to the event compared to unrelated anomalies. Older adults also showed N400 reductions for predictable compared to anomalous words but not for anomalous but event-related words compared to unrelated anomalies. Among older adults, age was negatively correlated with N400 effects of event-relatedness. Thus, whereas young adults seemed to broadly activate and maintain information about an event being described, even when it was linguistically infelicitous, older adults did not. However, older adults did differentiate the two types of anomalous words in a later time window (late positive complex), showing they eventually (likely more explicitly) appreciated the event-related relationships (after reading the related anomaly). These results thus suggest that the immediate availability of event knowledge during language comprehension is impacted by normal aging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Despite the increasing importance of digital skills in modern society, the development of information and communication technology (ICT) literacy in adulthood has received limited attention, particularly regarding gender differences over the course of life. Therefore, this study investigated between-person differences and within-person changes in ICT literacy over approximately 9 years in a sample of N = 2,266 adults from Germany. The result showed that younger adults exhibited higher ICT literacy than older adults, but within-person changes did not differ by age. On average, ICT literacy declined over time (Cohen's d = -0.30). Men consistently demonstrated higher ICT literacy than women (Cohen's d = 0.39), though gender did not influence changes in ICT literacy. Socioeconomic status did not robustly moderate these effects. These findings suggest that ICT literacy tends to decline across adulthood, while preexisting gender differences, likely rooted in earlier socialization processes, persist without substantial change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Gross-motor sequence learning is fundamental for performing daily activities and maintaining independence across the lifespan. This study investigated how age and age simulation affect gross-motor sequence learning, focusing on acquisition, execution performance, explicit recall, and retention performance. We tested 74 participants belonging to five groups: young adults aged 18-27 years without (n = 14) or with (n = 15) an age simulation suit, middle-aged adults aged 30-59 years without (n = 15) or with (n = 15) the suit, and older adults aged 60-86 years without the suit (n = 15). Participants in the suit condition wore the GERonTologic Simulator age suit (Moll, 2021), which simulates age-related physical impairments by reducing sensory perception, flexibility, and strength. Participants performed a fixed 10-element gross-motor sequence task requiring full-body movements over 28 practice trials. Explicit sequence recall was assessed after acquisition, and a retention test was conducted on the following day. All groups demonstrated implicit sequence learning and maintained their performance levels from the end of acquisition to the retention test. However, young adults without the suit exhibited the fastest execution times and highest explicit recall scores. Notably, the suit significantly impaired execution performance and explicit recall in both younger and middle-aged adults, indicating that peripheral impairments can hinder explicit memory formation even when implicit learning remains intact. These findings highlight the significant impact of peripheral sensorimotor declines on gross-motor sequence learning and memory formation across the adult lifespan. The results underscore the importance of considering both cognitive and sensorimotor factors in motor learning research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans instinctively adapt their speech dynamics based on their communication partner. Despite the significant developmental differences between infants and older adults, research on vocal communication directed toward older adults has primarily documented broad adjustments that enhance comprehension, often interpreted as mirroring baby talk. This study examined spoken, sung, and whispered vocalizations produced by young native English-speaking female adults directed at infants, older adults, and young adults. Three separate groups of speakers produced either spoken (19 speakers), sung (21 speakers), or whispered (19 speakers) vocalizations. Results showed distinct acoustic patterns in vocalizations directed toward older adults across all three vocal modes. Then, three separate groups of young native English-speaking listeners evaluated either the spoken (185 listeners), sung (194 listeners), or whispered (171 listeners) vocalizations and accurately identified the intended audience. These findings challenged the assumption of uniform communication strategies for infants and older adults. Furthermore, older adult-directed vocalizations were associated more with infants than with young adults. We propose that an assessment of the cognitive, hearing, emotional, and attentional needs and abilities of the audience is crucial in shaping communication dynamics, leading to distinct vocal dynamics for infants and older adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).