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Biomedical subjects

R T Zacks

Publications and source records attributed to R T Zacks.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1985

Mood, recall, and selectivity effects in normal college students.

In three experiments we explored the relation between normal variation in depressed mood and memory in college students. Subjects read and subsequently recalled stories whose protagonists experienced good, bad, and neutral events. Contrary to predictions arising independently from capacity theory and from schema theory, the recall of depressed and nondepressed subjects did not differ in either overall level or in affective content. The results are not easily handled by a conceptualization of depression, tied to schema theory, which proposes that negative cognitions are important for the initiation and maintenance of depression. The general usefulness of induction procedures in research on the depressive syndrome is discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1982

Encoding strategies used by young and elderly adults in a keeping track task.

College students and older adults (mean ages 20.4 and 71.5 years) performed in a "keeping track" task that required them to recall, in response to probe questions, the most recently presented of each of a fixed set of categories. Questions alternated with presentations of new sets of items. Response accuracy, reaction times, and verbal reports provided information on the participants' strategies. The findings were consistent with the view (e.g., Hasher & Zacks, 1979) that older adults' poorer memory results from reduced use of effortful strategies. The older persons used fewer active encoding strategies than the college students and were less accurate and slower to respond. A subgroup of the elderly adults reported some active encoding activities; they performed more like the college students than the remaining elderly participants. A follow-up study in which college students were allowed reduced opportunity for active encoding produced performance intermediate between the other two groups.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Timing, instructions, and inhibitory control: some missing factors in the age and memory debate.

In response to Luszcz and Bryan, we point to three omitted factors that have been found to influence the presence and size of age differences in memory tasks and that, as such, have important implications for resolving theoretical questions about aging and memory. These include: (1) age differences in circadian rhythms and testing time effects that are associated with such differences; (2) instructions that may have a particularly disruptive effect on older adults, and (3) inhibitory control differences that have an age-related impact on both estimates of working memory span and on performance in multitask studies.

Adult↗