Experimental Ageing Data

Badham, Stephen and Maylor, Elisabeth Ann (2018). Experimental Ageing Data. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852141

As the proportion of older adults in society continues to rise in the 21 century, geriatric research is becoming increasingly important. Ageing results in the decline of both physical and cognitive abilities and the most widespread cognitive decline is a reduction in memory ability. Recent research has found that when information is consistent with an individual’s knowledge and experience, it is easier to remember than abstract information and older adults appear to benefit from this effect more than do young adults. For example, when people are asked to remember an association between two words, age differences in memory performance are smaller for related word pairs (article-book, fatigue-sleep) compared to unrelated word pairs (article-lapel, fatigue-glass). It may therefore be possible to improve memory, particularly for older adults, by encouraging individuals to use knowledge and information that they are familiar with to support memory processes. The project will use a range of memory tests to investigate how people can use knowledge about the world to distinguish between different information in memory during retrieval; improve the chances of thinking in the same way when encoding information and when retrieving information; and reduce the amount of effort required to successfully encode and retrieve information.

Data description (abstract)

The data are a series of studies investigating how knowledge and experience may help alleviate age deficits in memory. This collection is comprised by 3 zip files, each with their own data file, codebook and ReadMe file, as well as the publication resulting. The main focus of the project was to highlight how pre-existing knowledge (familiarity) is used by individuals in memory tasks. The outcome will be to draw distinctions between the processing of familiar information and novel information. Processing of familiar and novel information occurs almost continuously in everyday life and therefore has widespread implications across many areas of psychology, neuroscience, gerontology and medicine. The key aim of the project is to provide foundation and guidance to future research by identifying fundamental aspects of cognition.

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Badham Stephen	Nottingham Trent University
Maylor Elisabeth Ann	University of Warwick

Sponsors:

ESRC

Grant reference:

ES/K002732/1

Topic classification:

Health

Keywords:

ageing, memory, psychology

Project title:

Age Differences in the Implementation of Knowledge and Experience to Support Memory

Grant holders:

Stephen Badham, Elizabeth Maylor

Project dates:

From	To
1 October 2012	30 September 2015

Date published:

18 Dec 2015 10:54

Last modified:

16 Aug 2018 08:18

Coverage and Methodology

Collection period:

Date from:	Date to:
1 October 2012	30 September 2015

Geographical area:

Country:

United Kingdom

Data collection method:

For data in file 'BadhamMaylor2016a':
Thirty-two young and 32 older adults took part in the experiment.1 Young participants were
recruited from the University of Warwick and received either £6 or course credit. Older
participants were all living independently and were recruited from an age study volunteer
panel populated by local advertisements; they each received £10 toward their travel
expenses. All participants were native English speakers except for three young adults.

For data in file 'BadhamMaylor2015':
Forty-eight young adults (33 female, ages 18–27 years, M =
20.0, SD = 1.9) and 48 older adults (33 female, ages 64–
86 years, M = 73.1, SD = 5.4) took part in the experiment.1
Young and older adults had similar years of education, M =
14.6, SD = 1.6, and M = 15.0, SD = 2.8, respectively (t < 1).
Young participants were either recruited from the university
and compensated a small amount, or they participated without
compensation as part of demonstration sessions at open days
for the Department of Psychology. Older adults were recruited
from the local community and were given compensation
toward their travel expenses.
Stimuli were 16 faces presented on a computer screen above
one of two names. Two highly famous individuals’ names
were used: Prince William (PW) and George Bush (GB). The
faces were all nonfamous individuals, but two faces were
lookalikes for PWand two were lookalikes for GB (lookalike
images were taken from the Internet). The remaining faces
were taken from an online database (Psychological Image
Collection at Stirling; http://pics.psych.stir.ac.uk/). The faces
were of white males who varied in their similarity to PWand
GB.

For data in file 'BadhamHayFoxonKaurMaylor2016b':
There were two factors: age (young vs. older adults; between participants) and prior knowledge (present vs. absent; within participants).

Thirty-nine young and 36 older adults took part in the experiment (this excludes one young and two older adults who failed to follow the instructions). Young participants were recruited from the University of Warwick and received either £6 or course credit. Older participants were all living independently and were recruited from an age study volunteer panel populated by local advertisements; they each received £10 toward their travel expenses. All participants were native English speakers.
Background information is summarized in Table 1, where it can be seen that young and older participants did not differ significantly in their years of education, t < 1. To assess cognitive functioning, participants completed the Digit Symbol Substitution test from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Revised (Wechsler, 1981) as a measure of processing speed, and the multiple choice part of the Mill Hill vocabulary test (Raven, Raven, & Court, 1988) as a measure of crystallized intelligence. The results were consistent with the literature (e.g., Salthouse, 2010) in showing lower speed but higher vocabulary in older than in young adults, t(73) = −7.27 and 9.15, respectively.

Observation unit:

Individual

Kind of data:

Numeric

Type of data:

Experimental data

Resource language:

English

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Age Differences in the Implementation of Knowledge and Experience to Support Memory

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