Prior retrieval effects in young and old adults.

Previous work has shown that successful recall boosts subsequent retrieval of the recalled items. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that this benefit from prior retrieval would be less strong in older adults. Contrary to expectation, the older adults showed as great a benefit from prior retrieval as did the young adults in both experiments. It is suggested that successful cued recall may act like an orienting task at encoding, to guide retrieval processes effectively, and that the benefit obtained from a successful retrieval is a function of the information used to guide the retrieval process.