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Dans les experiences d'apprentissage de liste, les interactions âge-traitement sont considerees comme une importante source d'information sur la localisation des deficits mnesiques emmagasinage-recouvrement dus a l'âge chez l'adulte. Les auteurs decrivent deux experiences dans lesquelles ces problemes sont etudies dans le contexte des effets de la concretude des items chez de jeunes adultes et des sujets âges dans des situations de rappel libre

Although it is generally acknowledged that decrements in long-term memory play an important role in the decline of everyday cognitive functioning in adulthood, problems have arisen in localizing the source of these memory deficits. In this article we address three of the methodological and measurement issues that have led to difficulties in interpreting research on adulthood developmental differences in acquisition and long-term retention. Specifically, these issues are stages-of-learning confounds, failures to separate storage and retrieval processes, and failures to separate forgetting from other factors that influence long-term retention tests. A general framework is presented in which each of these problems is dealt with. This model is subsequently applied to an experiment that examined the acquisition and long-term retention of pictures and words in associative memory in both young and old adults. The major findings were that (a) the picture-word manipulation had asymmetrical effects on acquisition and retention, (b) these asymmetries were different for the young and old adults, and (c) the locus (storage/retrieval) of age differences was different at acquisition than at retention. These results strongly suggest that the rules governing acquisition and forgetting are different, not only within age groups, but also across developmental levels in adulthood. More importantly, because the locus of developmental differences was different for acquisition and forgetting, it may be that different mechanisms underly the processing deficits experienced by the elderly when acquiring information than when trying to retain that information over extended periods of time.

As everyone knows, and as this volume clearly attests, the ability to process information undergoes substantial change throughout adulthood. Although considerable variability exists in the rates at which these cognitive functions develop in adulthood (e.g., Baltes & Willis, 1982; Denney, 1984), a number of writers have speculated that changes observed on specific cognitive tasks (e.g., episodic memory, speeded classification, problem solving, decision making, etc.) are actually the consequence of changes in some general or common component that uniformly alters information-processing abilities (e.g., slows, produces more errors, etc.) (cf. Cerella, 1985; Hasher & Zacks, 1979; Salthouse, 1982, and this volume). Others have suggested that these developments may be brought about by age-related changes in a number of different factors (e.g., spontaneous strategic processing [Perlmutter & Mitchell, 1982], attentional resources [Craik & Byrd, 1982], etc.).

Reasons for the transient nature of misinformation effects in children's long-term recollection are discussed. Two of the key issues are initial encoding confounds and analytical insensitivity. A recently developed model of long-term retention that eliminates these problems is outlined and used to analyze the data from two experiments on children's (kindergarten and Grade 2) story recall. The main results show that (a) misinformation effects were small in magnitude and were directly related to rate of forgetting, not age, (b) developmental differences in retention were controlled by forgetting, particularly storage failures, and (c) reminiscence occurred across test trials and increased the probability of correct factual recall. These results clearly demonstrate that when initial encoding is controlled and appropriate measurement techniques are in place, age and misinformation effects are independent

Past research has demonstrated that cognitive triage (weak-strong-weak recall pattern) is a robust effect that optimises children's recall. The aim of the current research was to determine whether adults’ free recall also exhibits triage and whether cognitive triage is less marked with older than younger adults’ recall. Younger and older adults memorised 16 unrelated words until all items were recalled perfectly. The triage pattern existed for both the younger and older adults’ recall and there was evidence for age differences in triage. Our results are consistent with claims of greater verbatim forgetting and increased susceptibility to output interference with age in adulthood. Further research is needed to determine whether fuzzy-trace theory adequately explains the ageing of triage and what factors play a role in the development of this pattern of recall in adulthood.

BRAINERD, CHARLES J.; KINGMA, JOHANNES; and HOWE, MARK L. On the Development of Forgetting. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 1103-1119. 3 conceptual issues are discussed that make the data of previous developmental studies of forgetting difficult to interpret, namely, stages-of-learning confounds, failure to separate forgetting per se from various performance factors that operate on retention tests, and failure to disentangle the relative contributions of storage-based forgetting and retrieval-based forgetting to retention test performance. A paradigm and model are presented that deal with these problems. Application of the model to the data of 4 experiments, 3 with elementary schoolers and 1 with adolescents, produced these major findings. (a) Contrary to previous studies, there were clear developmental trends in long-term retention that usually favored older children over younger children. (b) There were developmental trends in forgetting processes per se, again usually favoring older children, but these effects were confined to retrieval forgetting rather than storage forgetting. (c) There were developmental trends in the ability to relearn retrieval algorithms during long-term retention tests, with some types of relearning favoring older children and other types of relearning favoring younger children. (d) There were some important asymmetries between children's performance during acquisition of a list and their performance on long-term retention tests. This suggests that forgetting and acquisition are governed by quite different laws and hence require different theoretical assumptions.

BRAINERD, CHARLES J., and HOWE, MARK L. The Origins of All-or-None Learning. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 1028-1034. The question of whether very young children learn simple associations incrementally or in an all-or-none manner was examined in 3 experiments. The Estes RTT paradigm was used in all 3 experiments. The subjects were 3and 4-year-olds who learned letternumeral pairs. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that these items were learned in an all-or-none manner. A key finding was that the conditional probability of a success following an error did not exceed chance on pairs of test trials without intervening reinforcement. The conditional probabilities of successes and errors remained stationary across successive RTT blocks.