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Abstract:
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The current experiments were intended to investigate the tendency of younger and older adults to use knowledge acquired during encoding to guide source memory judgments at test. Participants studied a list of words with each word belonging to one of four categories. Each category, and the words chosen for that category, were assigned to a corner of the computer screen which contained one of four mathematical probability structures, 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25%, reflecting how many exemplars from a given category was to be presented in it. Both older and younger adults learned and later used the probability structure to guide source memory judgments. Additionally, Experiment 1 observed that dividing the attention of younger adults hindered their ability to do this. Experiment 2 found that the implementation of this new knowledge appears to be automatic considering that requiring younger adults to respond quickly did not hinder their ability to infer a word's source based on the probability structure. |
