PSYCHOLOGY MASTER'S THESIS ABSTRACT

Thu Anh Le

MA-Research
May 2001

The Mutual Constraints of Working Memory in Younger and Older Adults

    Working memory performs two main functions: storage and computation.  These two functions are hypothesized to share the same pool of mental resources.  The goal of the study was to manipulate the syntactic structure of sentences in the reading span task in order to increase computational demands and interfere with storage of sentence-final words.  Another goal was to examine age-related differences in overall working memory resources when processing demands were high.

    To manipulate syntactic structure, two types of sentences were used: center-embedded sentences with object-relative clauses, and simple non-embedded sentences.

    The results showed a decline in reading span storage capacity for older adults, but there was no evidence that increasing the processing demands decreased the storage capacity for either age group.  The predicted interactive effect of age and sentence complexity on working memory capacity was not found.  However, reading times for the sentences indicated that processing was affected by sentence complexity.

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