Age Differences in Susceptibility to Memory Interference During Recall of Categorizable but Not Unrelated Word Lists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The authors examined how divided attention (DA) and aging affect memory, and the use of organizational strategies, during retrieval. Younger and older adults studied a list of either unrelated or categorizable words presented auditorily under full attention, and later recalled them under full attention or DA condition with a word- or digit-monitoring distracting task. The magnitude of memory interference did not interact with age during retrieval of unrelated words. During retrieval of categorizable words, older adults suffered significantly greater memory interference than young in both DA conditions. The number of categories recalled was significantly reduced by the word- but not digit-based distracting task, and this effect did not differ across age groups. The number of words recalled per category was reduced in both DA conditions, in both age groups. Semantic clustering, corrected for total recall score, was reduced in older but not younger adults, in both DA conditions. Findings suggest that older adults cannot make use of strategies, to the same extent as do young, to boost memory for categorized words under DA conditions, leading to amplified memory interference.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".