Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 51, Issue 2 P70-P80, Copyright © 1996 by The Gerontological Society of America
Judging event covariation: effects of age and memory demand
SA Mutter and RM Pliske
Department of Psychology, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY 42101, USA.
In this study, we investigated age differences in the accuracy of
covariation judgement. Young and older adults were asked to solve
covariation problems under low or high memory demand conditions. For each
problem, subjects saw a sequential presentation of the event-state
combination in a 2 X 2 contingency table. Subjects either kept a running
tally of the frequencies of occurrence of each combination and used these
tallies to make their covariation judgement for the events (Low Memory
Demand), or they recalled the frequencies from memory, and then made their
judgement (High Memory Demand). Solution patterns across the problems
indicated which of four judgement strategies (i.e., Cell A, A vs B, Sum of
Diagonals, or Conditional Probability) the subject preferred. The results
showed that older adults were generally less accurate than young adults in
judging event covariation. Additional findings suggested that this
difference might be due to an age-related decline in memory for the
frequency of event combinations and to older adults' use of simpler, less
accurate judgement strategies.
