Title: Working Memory, Comprehension, and Aging: A Review and a New View
Abstract: This chapter discusses the theoretical and empirical literature that addresses aging and discourse comprehension. A series of five studies guided by a particular working memory viewpoint regarding the formation of inferences during discourse processing is described in the chapter. Compensatory strategies may be used with different degrees of likelihood across the life span largely as a function of efficiency with which inhibitory mechanisms function because these largely determine the facility with which memory can be searched. The consequences for discourse comprehension in particular may be profound because the establishment of a coherent representation of a message hinges on the timely retrieval of information necessary to establish coreference among certain critical ideas. Discourse comprehension is an ideal domain for assessing limited capacity frameworks because most models of discourse processing assume that multiple components, demanding substantially different levels of cognitive resources, are involved. For example, access to a lexical representation from either a visual array or an auditory message is virtually capacity free.
Publication Year: 1988
Publication Date: 1988-01-01
Language: en
Type: review
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 3239
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot