Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 52, Issue 2 P91-102, Copyright © 1997 by The Gerontological Society of America
Automatic category search and its transfer: aging, type of search, and level of learning
AD Fisk, WA Rogers, BP Cooper and DK Gilbert
Department of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
We examined the site of learning as a function of task type and age. Two
experiments examined whether learning in semantic category search is
exclusive to trained elements of categories or generalizable to other
elements of the trained categories. Specifically, we examined how practice
searching for small subsets of exemplars from taxonomic categories
transferred to untrained elements of those categories. Young and old adults
received extensive practice on memory search (Experiment 1) or visual
search (Experiment 2) tasks. Participants then transferred to conditions
assessing whether learning was exclusive to the trained words or
generalizable to other elements of the trained categories. The site of
learning in memory search appears to be at the category level for both
young and old adults. Level of learning in visual search appears to differ
as a function of age. Young adults' learning generalizes to the category
level, whereas older adults' learning is specific to the trained words.
