Cognitive correlates of mnemonics usage and verbal recall memory in old age

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to determine whether minimizi ng requisite processing resources to learn a word list would differentially improve recall of older adults and to examine the associations between mem ory and nonmemory cognitive abilities. Background: It has been hypothesized that a reduction in general processing resources contributes to age-relate d declines in memory and other cognitive abilities. Methods: Twenty-four yo ung adults and 47 older adults were administered two semantically related w ord lists, one list with words blocked into their categories and the other with categories intermixed. Tests of attention and working memory, language , and abstract reasoning were interspersed with the memory tasks. Participa nts were classified as young (age range: 17-30 years), young-old (age range : 65-73 years), and old-old (age range: 74-87 years) to compare the effects of List condition (i.e., blocked vs. unblocked) on recall performance. Cor relation and regression analyses were used to examine the cognitive correla tes of recall performance. Results: Expected age differences in recall perf ormance were observed. Based on the resource-reduction hypothesis of cognit ive aging, we hy pothesized that the blocked presentation of the to-be-reme mbered list would minimize processing demands and therefore differentially benefit recall in older elderly participants. Contrary to our prediction, h owever, the relative benefits of blocked list presentation on recall measur es were comparable for young and older participants. Correlations and regre ssion analyses revealed that recall performance was more strongly associate d with word finding ability than with working memory or abstract reasoning skills. Conclusions: Results suggest that level of recall of a semantically related word list and use of semantic clustering as an encoding strategy a re associated more strongly with general word finding skills than with proc essing capacity.