Age differences in recall and recognition.

Abstract

An experiment is reported in which young and elderly adults performed cued-recall and recognition tests while carrying out a choice reaction-time task. An analysis of covariance, with recognition performance as the covariate, showed a reliable age decrement in recall. It was therefore concluded that older people perform more poorly on recall tasks than they do on recognition tasks. Performance on the secondary (reaction time) task showed that recall was associated with greater resource costs than was recognition and that this effect was amplified by increasing age. The results are in line with the suggestion that recall requires more processing resources than does recognition and that such resources are depleted as people grow older. The literature on age differences in human memory includes a large number of studies comparing the performance of young and old adults on tests of recall and recognition memory. The results of these studies have consistently shown an age decrement in recall performance (see Botwinick, 1978; Burke &