Aging - Inhibition Deficits

Question 1

Connelly, Hasher, & Zacks, 1991

Answer 1

• Older adults reading times (but not comprehension accuracy) slowed in the presence of extraneous material. Older adults were differentially slowed by text-relevant distractors (compared to text-irrelevant), whereas young adults were equally slowed by both conditions

Question 2

Tun, O’Kane, & Wingfield, 2002

Answer 2

• Older adults speech recall more impacted by the presence of distractors, especially when distractors were semantically meaningful, whereas recall by young adults does not depend on the relatedness of the distractors

Question 3

Arbuckle, Nohara-LeClair, & Pushkar, 2000

Answer 3

• Higher levels of off-topic verbosity related to communicative inefficiency in a referential communication task

Question 4

Sommers & Danielson, 1999

Answer 4

• In SWR tasks, older adults are less able to inhibit lexical competitors (indexed by greater RT differences in identification of hard words – although the effect is mediated by the additional of semantic context), are more likely to produce errors consisting of lexical neighbors, especially for difficult words. Hierarchical linear regression analysis indicated that, independent of age/demographics, inhibition accounted for 36% of the variance in identification of difficult words in low-context sentence, and 20% in identification of difficult words in high context sentences. Results not accounted for by processing speed

Question 5

Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991

Answer 5

Evidence against the inhibition deficit hypothesis in explaining TOT states: number of persistent alternatives decrease with age, less partial information available in TOT states with age