Verbal-pictorial Recoding in the Elderly

Abstract

Older individuals have been reported to use imagery mediation less often than the young in remembering verbal material. To determine whether this is due to a decrease with age in the speed with which verbal stimuli are recoded into pictorial representations, the reaction time of 12 old (63-78) and 12 young (17-25) subjects for matching verbal description to geometric shapes was measured. While the elderly were generally slower, they were identical to the young in being faster at determining whether or not two simultaneously presented shapes were the same than they were a printed description of a shape and a shape. Also, in both age groups, when 1 or more sec elapsed between the presentation of the description and that of the shape, matching times were as quick as when both stimuli were shapes, suggesting that, for the old as well as the young, 1 sec was sufficient time to recode the description into a pictorial form.

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