Aging and the deletion function of inhibition

Charlot, V Feyereisen, Pierre [UCL]

The present study was adapted from the sentence completion task of Hartman and Hasher (1991). We addressed the question raised by Burke (1997): are the age-related differences in priming effects found in that task better explained by deficits in explicit memory or by inefficient inhibitory mechanisms? In the study phase, older and younger adults read high cloze sentences ending with an expected or an unexpected final word. In the second phase, participants were asked to complete sentence frames with either the final word presented during the study phase (inclusion condition) or with another, new word (exclusion condition). The third phase was an indirect memory test of perceptual identification. Finally, we compared explicit memory for recalled and inhibited words in a recognition test. In perceptual identification by older adults, priming was equivalent for recalled and inhibited words, whereas in younger adults priming was higher for recalled than for inhibited words. In the explicit memory test, recognition scores were lower for inhibited words in both age groups. These results are consistent with the view of Hasher and Zacks (1988), who assume an age-related decline in the ability to suppress no-longer-relevant information.