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AGE AND BEHAVIOR: LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE - STIMULUS PACING

More than thirty years ago Gilbert (1941) carried out an extraordinarily well-controlled study that demonstrated decline in performance with age on a variety of learning and memory tasks, but one type of task, especially, showed such decrement—a type which involved the formation of new associations—the paired-associate task. This task has remained prominent in the experimental study of learning in relation to age. (The paired-associate task involves a series of paired stimuli, very often words or letters. For example, one study paired the letters TL with the word INSANE, as one of the several paired associates in a list that was to be learned. After exposure to this and the other paired associates, a person having learned them will respond with the word, INSANE, when presented with the stimulus TL.)
Many times since Gilbert's study the paired-associate task has been shown to be specially difficult for older people. It had become accepted, on the basis of such studies, that learning ability—at least of the paired-associate kind—declines in later life. In recent years, however, this conclusion was opened to doubt. It was clear that in the studies of paired associates, performance declined with age, but did this mean that learning ability declined? Several investigators argued that experiments in paired-associate learning typically involve stimulus material so rapidly presented that the older person is required to rush his learning performances; the pacing is inappropriate to his normal speed of response patterns and, therefore, the studies are not adequate to judge learning ability.
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