Age and redintegration in immediate memory and their relationship to task difficulty

Abstract

[Abstract]: It is commonly assumed that as short-term memory tasks become more difficult a transient phonological trace that supports recall loses its fidelity. Recall can still be achieved through a process called redintegration where long-term phonological or lexical knowledge is used to reconstruct the memory trace. In the current research we explore age-related differences on the redintegration process by having older and younger participants study lists under different levels of task difficulty. In experiment 1 semantic similarity was manipulated and in Experiment 2 phonological similarity was varied as a means of examining the redintegration process. The results show that similarity effects can be accurately predicted from knowledge of task difficulty, with item scoring but not for order scoring. The results indicate support for the redintegration perspective and that while there may be differences in the absolute level of recall across age groups the redintegration process is identical for younger and older participants.