Age Differences in Adults' Free Recall, Cued Recall, and Recognition

Adults in their twenties and sixties were tested for free recall, cued recall, and recognition of words that they had studied in an intentional memory task or generated associations to in an incidental orienting task. Significant age-related declines in performances on intentional items were observed regardless of type of memory test. Significant age-related declines in performance on incidental items were also observed on free and cued recall tests; however, age differences on incidental items were attenuated on cued recall tests, and they were eliminated on recognition tests. In addition, while younger subjects profited more from retrieval cues that were associations they had themselves generated than from retrieval cues that were normed common associations, older subjects made comparable use of these two cue types.