Gist and Generalization in Young and Older Adults’ Causal Learning

Sharon A Mutter and Melanie W Asriel

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 2018, vol. 73, issue 4, 594-602

Abstract: ObjectivesTo investigate age differences in gist-based causal learning.MethodYoung and older adults learned to predict whether eating foods from each of 6 categories was or was not followed by sickness. Experience with the categories was varied by presenting 5 exemplars of a category in only one of 2 training phases (small categories) or by presenting 5 exemplars of a category in the first phase and an additional 5 exemplars in the second phase (large categories). Trained and novel exemplars from all categories appeared in subsequent causal judgment and recognition tests.ResultsThere were no age differences in causal judgments for old exemplars or in generalization of causal associations to novel exemplars. For both groups, causal generalization was more successful and recognition was less successful for exemplars from large categories. There was no age difference in recognition for large categories, but older adults performed more poorly than young adults for small categories.DiscussionOlder adults resemble young adults in their ability to induce unseen category features from presented exemplars, acquire causal associations for these gist representations, and generalize this knowledge to new exemplars. However, they continue to rely on these gist-based representations for memory discrimination, whereas young adults use both category and individuating features of cues.

Keywords: Causal learning; Generalization; Recognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbw026 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:geronb:v:73:y:2018:i:4:p:594-602.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B is currently edited by Psychological Sciences - S. Duke Han, PhD and Social Sciences - Jessica A Kelley, PhD, FGSA

More articles in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B from The Gerontological Society of America Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().