Decline of Immediate Recall with Age

Abstract

Three hypotheses regarding decline of immediate recall with age were tested: (1) that chunking or receding efficiency declines with age, (2) that immediate recall declines more rapidly with age as the input sequence is lengthened, and (3) that order errors in recall increase with age because of slowness in identifying individual items as they are presented. The subjects (62 men, 106 women) were asked to recall word-pair strings that varied in length (2, 4, 6, and 8 words) and in type (associated and unassociated word pairs). Results indicated that chunking efficiency declines with age, and that immediate recall of 8-item word-strings declines more rapidly with age than does immediate recall of 6-item strings. Group differences with regard to order errors did not indicate a consistent increase of order errors with age.