Taking charge of remembering: locus of control and older adults' memory for speech.

The relation between control beliefs and recall of spoken word lists and prose passages was assessed for 32 older adults, ages 62 to 85, in a task where they were given control over presentation of stimuli. They differed in the degree to which they believed that factors within their control (internals) or outside their control (externals) affected their intellectual functioning; they were similar in age, education, vocabulary, and digit span. They were required to stop the speech input at points of their own choosing to recall the stimuli on a segment-by-segment basis. Externals were more likely than internals to make inaccurate predictions of the number of words they could remember and to choose longer segments than they could recall. Results suggest that externals are poorer than internals in monitoring on-line memory processing.