Young, middle-age, and old adults ranked similarities of word pairs in a conditional rank-ordering task. Multidimensional scaling analyses of those similarity judgments provided measures of depth of processing (the kind of attribute dimensions considered in ranking similarities) and elaboration (the number of dimensions considered). Analyses of variance revealed an age-related decline in semantic processing but no such decline for elaboration. In recalling the words after the rank-ordering task, old adults' retrieval was less compatible with initial processing than was the case for younger adults, i.e., there was less correspondence between inter-word distances in recall and in the scaling solutions. The results confirmed the feasibility of multidimensional scaling methods for evaluating levels-of-processing issues.
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