Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 54, Issue 2 P107-P115, Copyright © 1999 by The Gerontological Society of America

ARTICLES

Longitudinal changes in quantitative and qualitative indicators of word and story recall in young-old and old-old adults

BJ Small, RA Dixon, DF Hultsch and C Hertzog
Department of Gerontology, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA. [email protected]

The present study examined longitudinal changes in quantitative and qualitative measures of episodic memory. The sample, taken from the Victoria Longitudinal Study, consisted of 158 young-old adults (initially 55 to 70 years old) and 84 old-old adults (initially 71 to 86 years old) who were tested three times over six years. Average word and text recall, as well as five indicators of qualitative aspects of word recall (e.g., number of categories recalled) and one indicator of structure of text recall (i.e., levels of information) were used. For word recall, although both age groups exhibited negative longitudinal changes in quantitative performance, overall qualitative performance was generally stable. Two qualitative indicators (number of categories and intrusions) showed modest decline and one (organization at recall) showed improvement. Results for overall text recall showed significant performance increments for the young-old group, whereas the old-old group exhibited slight declines in overall performance. Analyses of qualitative measures showed stable structure of hierarchical recall, with the old-old being impaired at all levels of detail in the stories. Overall results suggest that some underlying structural characteristics of word and text recall may be maintained into late life even when significant overall decline is observed.

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