Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 52, Issue 5 P216-P228, Copyright © 1997 by The Gerontological Society of America
Controlled and automatic forms of memory and attention: process purity and the uniqueness of age-related influences
TA Salthouse, JP Toth, HE Hancock and JL Woodard
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, USA. [email protected]
Estimates of controlled and automatic processes hypothesized to underlie
performance in a memory task and in an attention task were derived for 115
participants from 18 to 78 years of age using the process-dissociation
procedure. Participants also performed speed and neuropsychological tests
that were suspected to be negatively related to age. Process estimates
showed good reliability (from .76 to .98), and the qualitative distinction
between processes was supported by the overall pattern of correlations
among measures. However, only estimated automatic processes exhibited
unique variance, as they were either weakly related or unrelated both to
performance on the other tests and to each other. Estimates of the control
processes, in contrast, shared considerable variance with measures from
other tests, and there were no unique, or independent, age-related effects
on these measures. The results highlight the need to distinguish between
process purity and the uniqueness of age-related influences in accounting
for age differences in cognition.
