Metacognitive awareness of the associative deficit for words and names

ABSTRACTOlder adults have considerable impairment in associative recognition despite minimal age differences in item recognition. The magnitude of this associative deficit varies by type of stimuli, strategy utilization, and other mediators and moderators (Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008, Psychology and Aging, 23, 104–118). Name pair stimuli have not been used to test the associative deficit hypothesis (ADH), although tests using name–face stimuli support the ADH. Additionally, metacognitive awareness of the ADH has not been investigated. We tested the ADH with word and name pair stimuli, and predicted that age-related associative deficits would be larger for words than names because names, unlike most common nouns, lack certain semantic properties that could be used to bind pairs of names together. Results supported the ADH for words but not names: Younger and older adults recognized equivalently fewer names on the associative test relative to the item test. As predicted, self-efficacy was higher for younger ...