Dissertation Information for George Spilich NAME: - George Spilich
- (Alias) George John Spilich
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- Psychology
SCHOOL:
- University of Pittsburgh (USA) (1980)
ADVISORS: - None COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - None
MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected
Title: DISCOURSE PROCESSING IN YOUNG-NORMAL, AGED-NORMAL, AND AGED-SENILE INDIVIDUALS
Abstract: "It has been suggested that the oft-observed age-related decrement in memory performance is a function of materials; age differences found with CVC trigrams would evaporate when the experimental task involved meaningful prose, especially when the content of that prose was cohort-specific to the aged. The goal of the present study was to investigate if and how the young and the elderly might differ in the way in which they process both general and also aged cohort-specific text.
Two passages were read aloud and subsequently recalled by three groups each of sixteen young-normal, elderly-normal, or elderly-senile individuals. The mean ages of these groups were 21.4, 81.1, and 82.5, respectively. All three groups were matched on WAIS vocabulary scale; the distinction between senile and non-senile aged was made via the Wechsler Memory Scale. One of the passages dealt with tulips; the other with a woman's eighty-fifth birthday. All subjects participated in free recall, cued recall, and recognition tasks. Free recall was scored in terms of amount recalled, thematic relation of recalled items, and types of errors; cued recall was analyzed as a function of additional material elicited; recognition performance was viewed as a function of sensitivity to both semantic and syntactic distractors. It was found that the young correctly recalled more information than did the elderly-normals, who in turn recalled more than the senile individuals. However, both young and elderly-normal individuals were sensitive to passage structure and recalled proportionately more of the important idea units in the texts; senile individuals showed little or no sensitivity to hierarchical structure. Cued recall was relatively poor for all groups, and this was explained as a function of the nature of the cues used. In the recognition task, the young almost invariably chose the correct item; aged-normals typically picked either the correct item or one which preserved meaning; senile individuals typically chose distractors which were true about the world in general but referred to events not mentioned in the text. Finally, the Kintsch and van Dijk (Psychological Review, 1978, 85, 363-354) model of text processing was applied to the protocols. The results suggested that a decrease in the capacity of a hypothetical working memory store best explained the elderly-normal's data, while the best fit model to the elderly-senile's data suggested that their contents of working memory were loaded in an uncontrolled or random fashion.
It was concluded that a general age-related memory decrement for complex verbal materials exists, and that both important quantitative and qualitative changes in cognitive operations differentiate normal from senile thought."
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MPACT Scores for George Spilich A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:03:06
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