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Contributors
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- By Brittany L. Anderson-Montoya, Heather R. Bailey, Carryl L. Baldwin, Daphne Bavelier, Jameson D. Beach, Jeffrey S. Bedwell, Kevin B. Bennett, Richard A. Block, Deborah A. Boehm-Davis, Corey J. Bohil, David B. Boles, Avinoam Borowsky, Jessica Bramlett, Allison A. Brennan, J. Christopher Brill, Matthew S. Cain, Meredith Carroll, Roberto Champney, Kait Clark, Nancy J. Cooke, Lori M. Curtindale, Clare Davies, Patricia R. DeLucia, Andrew E. Deptula, Michael B. Dillard, Colin D. Drury, Christopher Edman, James T. Enns, Sara Irina Fabrikant, Victor S. Finomore, Arthur D. Fisk, John M. Flach, Matthew E. Funke, Andre Garcia, Adam Gazzaley, Douglas J. Gillan, Rebecca A. Grier, Simen Hagen, Kelly Hale, Diane F. Halpern, Peter A. Hancock, Deborah L. Harm, Mary Hegarty, Laurie M. Heller, Nicole D. Helton, William S. Helton, Robert R. Hoffman, Jerred Holt, Xiaogang Hu, Richard J. Jagacinski, Keith S. Jones, Astrid M. L. Kappers, Simon Kemp, Robert C. Kennedy, Robert S. Kennedy, Alan Kingstone, Ioana Koglbauer, Norman E. Lane, Robert D. Latzman, Cynthia Laurie-Rose, Patricia Lee, Richard Lowe, Valerie Lugo, Poornima Madhavan, Leonard S. Mark, Gerald Matthews, Jyoti Mishra, Stephen R. Mitroff, Tracy L. Mitzner, Alexander M. Morison, Taylor Murphy, Takamichi Nakamoto, John G. Neuhoff, Karl M. Newell, Tal Oron-Gilad, Raja Parasuraman, Tiffany A. Pempek, Robert W. Proctor, Katie A. Ragsdale, Anil K. Raj, Millard F. Reschke, Evan F. Risko, Matthew Rizzo, Wendy A. Rogers, Jesse Q. Sargent, Mark W. Scerbo, Natasha B. Schwartz, F. Jacob Seagull, Cory-Ann Smarr, L. James Smart, Kay Stanney, James Staszewski, Clayton L. Stephenson, Mary E. Stuart, Breanna E. Studenka, Joel Suss, Leedjia Svec, James L. Szalma, James Tanaka, James Thompson, Wouter M. Bergmann Tiest, Lauren A. Vassiliades, Michael A. Vidulich, Paul Ward, Joel S. Warm, David A. Washburn, Christopher D. Wickens, Scott J. Wood, David D. Woods, Motonori Yamaguchi, Lin Ye, Jeffrey M. Zacks
- Edited by Robert R. Hoffman, Peter A. Hancock, University of Central Florida, Mark W. Scerbo, Old Dominion University, Virginia, Raja Parasuraman, George Mason University, Virginia, James L. Szalma, University of Central Florida
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Handbook of Applied Perception Research
- Published online:
- 05 July 2015
- Print publication:
- 26 January 2015, pp xi-xiv
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9 - Capacity theory and the processing of inferences
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- By Rose T. Zacks, Michigan State University, Lynn Hasher, Duke University
- Edited by Leah L. Light, Deborah M. Burke
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- Book:
- Language, Memory, and Aging
- Published online:
- 05 January 2012
- Print publication:
- 25 November 1988, pp 154-170
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Summary
The study of adult age differences in comprehension of and memory for text is a now burgeoning enterprise in cognitive gerontology, in part because of the potential for direct application of the findings to everyday life. To date, the work on discourse processing suggests the existence of age deficits of varying magnitudes, deficits that are largely quantitative rather than qualitative in nature. The work thus suggests that older adults use the same processing mechanisms as younger adults but with poorer results (e.g., Mandel & Johnson, 1984; Zelinski, Light, & Gilewski, 1984).
Beyond this summary the literature yields few simple generalizations; indeed, the findings on any given variable (e.g., educational level) tend to be complex and inconsistent. Consider the literature on the recall of ideas that differ in their importance to the meaning structure of the text. The usual finding with young adults (called the “levels effect”) is that the probability of recalling information from text is directly related to the information's importance level in the text as defined by a model (e.g., Kintsch's, 1974) of the hierarchical structure of that text. When young and elderly adults have been compared, different experiments have produced contradictory results (for a recent review, see Zelinski et al., 1984; see also Cohen, this volume). The most frequent findings are (1) parallel levels effects for younger and older adults (e.g., Zelinski et al., 1984); or (2) an exaggerated levels effect for the older adults, with the greatest age deficit seen at low importance levels (e.g., Dixon, Hultsch, Simon, & von Eye, 1984, for high verbal ability subjects; Spilich, 1983).