Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 52, Issue 6 P319-P328, Copyright © 1997 by The Gerontological Society of America
Frequency discrimination vs frequency estimation: adult age differences and the effect of divided attention
SA Mutter and KM Goedert
Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green 42101, USA. sharon.mutter@wku.edu
In this experiment we explored age differences in frequency judgment. Young
and older adults studied words occurring from one to six times under
divided or focused attention and then completed either a frequency
discrimination or a frequency estimation test for these items. Divided
attention led to poorer performance on both frequency judgment tests,
suggesting that distraction during the encoding of target events results in
less optimal encoding of the information that is necessary for any type of
frequency judgment. Contrary to the notion that older adults encode this
information more superficially than young adults, older adults were as
sensitive as young adults to relative differences in the frequency of
target words, and distraction did not magnify age differences for either
type of frequency judgment task. On the other hand, older adults were less
accurate in assigning an absolute numerical value to the frequency of the
target words. Altogether, the results are consistent with the idea that the
encoding and/or retrieval processes required for accurate numerical
estimation of frequency suffer a larger age-related decline than do those
required for accurate discrimination of relative frequency.
