Metamemory in the aged.

College age (mean age 20 years) and older adults (mean age 69 years) were asked to predict their memory spans and to indicate readiness to recall sets of line drawings in Experiment 1. Although no age differences were found in span prediction accuracy, clear differences were obtained in recall readiness. When given unlimited study time with sets of items matched in difficulty, young adults chose to study longer and then recalled more accurately than did older adults. In Experiment 2 the recall of a chunking and rehearsal trained group of older adults was better than that of a control group given standard instructions. However, the best recall was obtained in a group required to take extra study time but given no strategy training. The older adult recall readiness deficit may thus not have been due to lack of available memory strategies. Instead, we hypothesize that older adults may have failed to monitor their readiness to recall so that they did not know how long to study.