Age effects in a computational model of memory

Previous research demonstrates that semantic priming is relatively unaffect ed by age (Chiarello, Church, si Hoyer, 1985; Howard, 1988). To determine h ow age might affect representations in the HAL model of memory, the authors gathered text from older and younger adults and generated a global co-occu rrence matrix for each. An analysis demonstrated that, as in humans, there was little difference in measures of semantic priming between memory matric es constructed from the two corpora. However, the authors discovered that s emantic word neighborhoods generated by thc older adult corpus were denser than corresponding neighborhoods derived from the younger. adults corpus. T his result has implications For changes in the semantic representation of w ords due to the aging process. (C) 2000 Academic Press.