Meaningfulness and recall of names by young and old adults

Names from one of four list conditions (elderly-relevant, young-relevant, nonmeaningful) were presented to 56 young and 56 old adults. Contrary to the findings often reported in the gerontological literature on memory, with free recall the elderly adults remembered as many names as did the young. Superior performance for the young was observed only in the young-relevant list condition. The elderly adults recalled significantly more names than did the young from the elderly- and both-relevant lists. No differences were observed for the nonmeaningful list. When asked to rate their perceived performance on the memory task, however, the older adults rated themselves lower than the young adults.