This study examined age differences in episodic memory, semantic memory, and priming using a random sample of 1,000 men and women from 10 age groups (35, 40, 45, . . . 80 years). The main purpose was to determine whether an age effect existed after differences on various demographic, intellectual, and biological factors had been controlled for. The simple correlations of age with episodic and semantic memory performance were found to be significant, whereas no relationship was found between age and levels of priming. After controlling for differences on the background factors, age predicted episodic but not semantic memory performance. It is proposed that the failure to account for the age effect on episodic memory is because it is caused by age-related neuronal changes.

Memory for simple action phrases (e.g., "Break a match") improves when subjects perform the actions at study. The relative contribution of item-specific and relational processing to this enactment effect has been an issue of considerable debate. It was addressed in the present study by examining hypermnesia in a multiple-test free recall paradigm, based on the assumptions that itemspecific processing increases the probability of intertest gains and relational processing protects against intertest forgetting (e.g., Bums, 1993;Klein,Loftus, Kihlstrom, & Aseron, 1989). It was found that the enactment condition produced both significantly more gains and more losses than did the nonenactment condition, resulting in a net gain (hypermnesia) for the enactment condition. The results suggest that enactment promotes item-specific processing at the expense of relational processing.It is a well-established empirical fact that memory for action phrases (e.g., "Break a match") benefits greatly when the subjects perform the actions relative to when they simply read or listen to the phrases (for a review, see Cohen, 1989;Engelkamp & Zimmer, 1994). The source of this "enactment" effect remains disputed, however. Although it is generally agreed that enactment adds itemspecific information to the "memory trace" (e.g., Backman, Nilsson, & Chalom, 1986;Helstrup, 1986;Nyberg, 1993;Saltz & Donnenwerth-Nolan, 1981;Zimmer & Engelkamp, 1989), the effect on relational processing is unclear.Item-specific processing is assumed to increase the distinctiveness of an item in memory by emphasizing features that discriminate a particular item from other items, whereas relational processing is assumed to increase the organization of items in memory by focusing on features that are shared and by encoding interitem associations (Hunt & Einstein, 1981). Some authors claim that the enactment effect is due to increased relational processing, as well as item-specific processing (e.g., Backman et al., 1986); others argue that the effect is due exclusively to increased item-specific processing (e.g., Engelkamp & Zimmer, 1994, 1996Zimmer & Engelkamp, 1989). Engelkamp (1995) has even suggested that enactment may hinder relational processing by forcing attention to itemspecific information and by hampering encoding of relational information. Both views draw on comparisons of adjusted ratio of clustering (ARC) scores (Roenker, Thompson, & Brown, 1971)-an index of organization in free recall of categorized lists-for support. Some researchers have reported significantly higher ARC scores in recall for subject-performed tasks (SPTs) than in recall for verbal tasks (VTs) (Backman et al., 1986), indicating increased relational processing, whereas others have failed to find any difference (Engelkamp & Zimmer, 1996;Zimmer & Engelkamp, 1989), suggesting that enhanced relational processing does not contribute to the enactment effect. Engelkamp and Zimmer (1996) recently tested the hypothesis that differences in materials were responsible for the previous incompatibl...

This study examined the effects of dual task requirements on age differences in free recall performance. One thousand adults ranging in age between 35 and 80 years performed a word recall task alone and concurrently with a card-sorting task (at encoding, retrieval, or both). Age differences in memory performance were substantial under single task conditions, but after correcting memory performance under dual task conditions for differences in single task performance, age did not predict performance. These results do not support the hypothesis that reduced attentional capacity in old age is underlying age differences in episodic memory.

The effect of enactment on memory for serial order was investigated in two experiments. In both experiments a reconstruction task was used to separate order from item information. In Experiment 1 enactment and test information was manipulated between groups. For subjects who had not been informed about the reconstruction test, performance of verbal and motor groups was similar with regard to both serial-position curves and overall performance. For subjects who knew beforehand that they would be tested for memory of the order of the action events, performance in the verbal condition was significantly better than in the motor condition. In Experiment 2, the reversed enactment effect for test-informed subjects was replicated with a within-subjects design. The results agree with Engelkamp and Zimmer's (1984, 1994) position that enactment serves exclusively to enhance item information, and indicate that subjects have less control over the encoding processes when they are enacting than during verbal encoding (cf. Cohen, 1981).

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