Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 52, Issue 4 P178-P186, Copyright © 1997 by The Gerontological Society of America
Older and younger adults use a functionally identical algorithm to select items for restudy during multitrial learning
J Dunlosky and C Hertzog
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. [email protected]
We investigated whether aging affects several components of how people
select items for study during multitrial learning. Younger and older adults
studied paired-associate items and then made delayed judgements of learning
(JOLs). Immediately after making a JOL for an item, some participants
decided whether to restudy the item on subsequent trials; for other
participants, the computer selected for restudy the items that had been
judged as least-well learned. Next, paired-associate recall occurred, which
was followed by restudy-test trials. As expected, age differences occurred
in recall on the first trial, and this difference was propagated across
trials. In contrast to the hypothesis that older adults would be more
conservative in selecting items, both age groups selected to restudy (a)
the items that they had rated as least-well learned and (b) the majority of
items that would not be recalled on the first trial. Comparisons between
participants who self-selected items vs the groups in which the computer
controlled selection also converged on the conclusion of age equivalence in
processes underlying item selection.
