MEMORY FOR PICTORIAL INFORMATION AND THE PICTURE SUPERIORITY EFFECT

This research compared the performance of younger (mean age — 20.7 years) and older (mean age–68.3 years) adults on a memory task that involved pictures, words, and pictures‐plus‐words as stimuli. The results, consistent with previous research, indicated an equivalent picture superiority effect for both young and old adults when pictures were compared to words. More specifically, although recall scores were significantly higher for younger adults compared to older adults, the superior recall scores for pictures versus words did not differ between the age groups. However, the performance of older adults declined markedly, compared to the younger adults, in the picture‐plus‐word condition. These findings are interpreted as providing support for a divided attention model, which involves effortful processing of both visual and verbal aspects of stimuli. This situation of divided attention appears to put older adults at a relative disadvantage compared to young adults.