Adult age differences in memory for modality attributes.

Young and elderly subjects performed on two memory tasks. The first task involved recognition of word content and identification of each word's sex of voice in the study list. An additional independent variable consisted of intentional versus incidental learning instructions. An age difference favoring young adults was found for both word recognition and sex of voice recognition, confirming earlier evidence found with a more difficult sentence recall task. Comparable age deficits were found on the second task involving word recognition and identification of each word's case format in the study list. Encoding of modality attributes does appear to be an effortful process and is susceptible to age deficits. However, contrary to the age differentiation hypothesis, the cross-task correlation between modality recognition scores was no greater for elderly adults than for young adults.