Recall of actions, sentences, and nouns: Influences of adult age and passage of time☆

Abstract The drop in performance between immediate free recall (IFR) and final free recall (FFR) was compared for action events (subject-performed tasks or SPTs), and two types of verbal materials (sentences and nouns). The results showed a more pronounced drop in performance from IFR to FFR for the verbal materials than for the SPTs. This finding was discussed in terms of SPTs being less sensitive to proactive interference than verbal materials, resulting in less forgetting over the initial minutes of retention for SPTs. In addition, age differences in recall of the same types of materials were examined for one group of young subjects ( M = 19.1 years) and one group of old subjects ( M = 69.3 years). Differences in recall, favouring the young, were more pronounced for the verbal materials than for the SPTs.

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