Effects of word fragment completion on free recall. A selective improvement of older adults.

Younger adults (mean age 20.7 years), 73-year-olds, and 82-year-olds studied words and words with two missing letters that had to be completed (word fragments) under incidental learning conditions. Results from an unexpected free recall test showed that the 82-year-olds recalled significantly more word fragments than words, whereas the 73-year-olds showed a slight improvement in the same direction. The younger adults, on the other hand, did not benefit from the additional encoding activity of the word fragment completion, although they showed a higher level of recall performance than the elderly groups for both encoding conditions. It is suggested that older adults may need the attentional guidance provided by the problem-solving demands of word fragment completion to perform maximally in this situation, whereas younger adults, because of a superior ability for self-initiated recoding operations, are less dependent on this form of cognitive support.