ADULT AGE-DIFFERENCES IN CONTROLLED AND AUTOMATIC MEMORY PROCESSING

The memory performance of groups of younger, middle-aged, and older pa rticipants was tested on indirect and direct tests of word stem comple tion and on a process-dissociation task. As expected, on the direct te sts of stem completion, older participants had lower scores than the y ounger and middle-aged groups. Age effects were also found on the indi rect word completion test. The process dissociation task allowed memor y performance to be divided into controlled and automatic processing c omponents. Estimates of automatic processing were comparable for the t hree groups, but there was an age effect for controlled processing, wi th the middle-aged and older groups differing from the younger group. These results confirm the findings of J. M. Jennings and L. L. Jacoby (1993) and suggest that the decline in conscious processing efficiency begins in middle age.