Age differences in primary organization or processing variability? Part I: An examination of age and primary organization.

We compared young and elderly adults on the ability to serially recall sequences of letters assumed to be stored in secondary memory. The results showed that older adults recalled significantly fewer complete strings than younger adults. However, both age groups exhibited the same pattern of transitional error probabilities (TEPs), indicating that the two groups were chunking information in the same qualitative manner. Interestingly, though, the older adults exhibited higher TEP spikes (indicating stronger chunk bounderies) than did younger adults. These results do not support the view that there are qualitative age differences in primary organization, but the results do indicate that older adults have a secondary memory deficit.