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Going shopping and identifying landmarks: does collaboration improve older people's memory?
Author(s) -
Ross Michael,
Spencer Steven J.,
Linardatos Lisa,
Lam Kent C. H.,
Perunovic Mihailo
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.1023
Subject(s) - recall , psychology , certainty , landmark , social psychology , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , philosophy , epistemology
Older participants (mean age = 72.82 years) attempted to recall items from shopping lists while shopping in a supermarket and subsequently in their homes on recognition tests. They also attempted to identify local landmarks on a map. The recall occurred either together with their spouses or independently. Collaborative recall was compared to the pooled, nonredundant recall of spouses who completed the memory tasks alone (nominal groups). Nominal groups produced more hits on most measures and never fewer hits than did collaborative groups. However, collaborative groups consistently generated fewer memory errors than did nominal groups. In many everyday contexts, a tendency for collaboration to reduce false recall could be advantageous to older people. Signal detection analyses revealed that collaboration leads couples to require a higher level of certainty before they are willing to claim that they recognize an item. Finally, we examined the relation between expertise and recall in the shopping and landmark tasks. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.