Prediction accuracy of young and middle-aged adults in memory for familiar and unfamiliar texts

This study investigated the influence of age, familiarity, and level of exposure on the metamemorial skill of prediction accuracy on a future test. Young (17 to 23 years old) and middle-aged adults (35 to 50 years old) were asked to predict their memory for text material. Participants made predictions on a familiar text and an unfamiliar text, at three different levels of exposure to each. The middle-aged adults were superior to the younger adults at predicting performance. This finding indicates that metamemory may increase from youth to middle age. Other findings include superior prediction accuracy for unfamiliar compared to familiar material, a result conflicting with previous findings, and an interaction between level of exposure and familiarity that appears to modify the main effects of those variables.

Identification of speeded and slowed familiar melodies by younger, middle-aged, and older musicians and nonmusicians

There is a range of tempos within which listeners can identify familiar tunes (around 0.8 to 6.0 notes/s). Faster and slower tunes are difficult to identify. The authors assessed fast and slow melody-identification thresholds for 80 listeners ages 17–79 years with expertise varying from musically untrained to professional. On fast-to-slow (FS) trials the tune started at a very fast tempo and slowed until the listener identified it. Slow-to-fast (SF) trials started slow and accelerated. Tunes either retained their natural rhythms or were stylized isochronous versions. Increased expertise led to better performance for both FS and SF thresholds (r = .45). Performance declined uniformly across the 62-year age range in the FS condition (r = .27). SF performance was unaffected by age. Although early encoding processes may slow with age, expertise has a greater effect. Musical expertise involves perceptual learning with melodies at a wide range of tempos.