AGING AND THE IMPACT OF CAUSAL CONNECTIONS ON TEXT COMPREHENSION AND MEMORY

The hypothesis that aging is associated with an increased dependence o n text-based organizational cues to support recall was investigated in two experiments. in the first, young and older adults read pairs of s entences that varied in their causal coherence. Recall for the second sentence in each pair was then rested using the first as a cue. The pa ttern of results suggested that young adults were likely to spontaneou sly infer causal connections between sentences when none was provided, whereas older adults were more likely to depend upon text-based conne ctions to establish coherence and support memory. Experiment 2 support ed this conclusion by demonstrating that the recall performance of old er adults benefited more than did that of young and middle-aged adults when participants (a) were prompted to produce a link between sentenc es or (b) actually produced an integrative response that established a causal connection between the first and second sentences.