VERBAL AND PICTORIAL ELABORATIONS ENHANCE MEMORY IN YOUNGER AND OLDERADULTS

These studies examined the facilitative role of verbal and pictorial e laborations in younger and older adults' recall of verbal material. Du ring acquisition, subjects studied short sentences under one of severa l encoding/retrieval conditions where the presence of verbal and picto rial elaborations was systematically varied. Subjects later recalled t he target adjectives, given the sentence frames as a prompt. In Experi ment 1, explanatory verbal elaborations at study and test enhanced ver bal recall for both age groups, but no benefit of pictorial elaboratio ns was observed. In Experiment 2, pictorial elaborations improved reca ll for both age groups. A significant Age x Encoding Condition interac tion effect revealed that the benefit was especially pronounced for th e older adults. The implications of these results for understanding th e facilitative effects of pictorial illustrations on older adults' rec all of verbal material are discussed.