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Remembering versus knowing television theme tunes in middle‐aged and elderly adults
Author(s) -
Maylor Elizabeth A.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1995.tb02543.x
Subject(s) - psychology , theme (computing) , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , social psychology , computer science , operating system
Current evidence on ageing and states of awareness in memory tasks is mixed. In all cases, there is an age‐related decline in memory accompanied by recollective experience (remember responses); however, for memory in the absence of recollective experience (know responses), there is no effect of age in some experiments but an increase with age in others. This paper presents data from a tune recognition experiment (Maylor, 1991) in which subjects were not explicitly asked to make remember/know decisions. Here, these states of awareness are inferred from subjects' responses. Middle‐aged and elderly volunteers listened to theme tunes from television programmes; if they recognized the tune, they were asked to provide as much information about the programme as possible. Age significantly influenced remember responses (theme tune familiar plus some information about the programme reported) but not know responses (theme tune familiar but no information about the programme reported). Thus the analysis provides further converging evidence that knowing can remain invariant across manipulations that reduce the level of remembering.