Life-span differences in semantic integration of pictures and sentences in memory

This study examined life-span developmental differences in spontaneous integration of semantically relevant material presented in pictures and sentences. 45 third graders, 45 sixth graders, 45 high school students, and 30 adults over 60 were presented a sequence of 24 pictures and sentences, followed by 24 intervening items. Each intervening item corresponded to, but was in the opposite modality from, one of the original items and was either semantically relevant or irrelevant to the corresponding original. In a "same-different" recognition test, data suggested that the sixth-grade and high school subjects semantically integrated original items with relevant intervening items that were in the opposite modality and made subsequent recognition responses on the basis of the integrated memory. Third graders and older adults, however, showed no evidence of spontaneous, cross-modality semantic integration. Further, increasing the temporal delay between presenting the to-be-integrated items, from 5 min to 1 day, decreased overall response sensitivity but did not alter the patterns of integration results. The findings are discussed in terms of age differences in the spontaneous use of strategies for effective memory processing, with the extreme age groups processing more formal characteristics of the stimuli in memory, and the middle 2 groups processing deeper, more semantic information.