One of the hallmarks of healthy adult aging is a notice-
able decline in memory performance. However, this cogni-
tive deficit is highly selective; certain aspects of memory
tend to be substantially impaired in older adults, whereas
other aspects are remarkably well preserved. Episodic
memory tasks, in which some temporal context must be
associated with the content being held in memory, are par-
ticularly challenging for older adults (Burke & Light, 1981;
Kausler, 1994; Salthouse, 1991). Furthermore, within the
spectrum of episodic memory tasks, older adults have the
most difficulty with self-initiated recall of word lists, es-
pecially when the items are semantically unrelated (Burke
& Light, 1981; Craik, 1977; Kausler, 1994).
Results from various recall and recognition tasks have
generated several theories about the causes of this epi-
sodic memory deficit in healthy older adults. Many of
these have focused on fairly general explanations for this
loss, such as reduced executive or working memory re-
sources (see Light, 1991, for a review), and/or reduced
processing speed (Salthouse, 1996). Others have cited an
increased susceptibility to interference as a source of gen-
eral cognitive decline (Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000). These
behavioral declines have been attributed to age-related
neuronal loss, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, with its
essential role for effective executive function (Bäckman,
Small, & Wahlin, 2001; West, 1996). Consistent with this
connection, functional imaging studies have shown the
right prefrontal cortex to be more active during temporal
order retrieval than during item retrieval in young adults,
but not in older adults, establishing a more direct link be-
tween older adults’ context memory deficits and frontal
dysfunction (Cabeza, Anderson, Houle, Mangels, & Ny-
berg, 2000).
Generalized theories, such as reduced resources or cog-
nitive slowing, have been used to account for a wide range
of memory deficits in adult aging, but most fail to explain
the highly selective nature of these deficits. One of the
most notable of these is a selective deficit in older adults’
ability to make use of temporal associations between
items in recall (Howard, Kahana, & Wingfield, 2006;
Kahana, Howard, Zaromb, & Wingfield, 2002; Naveh-
Benjamin, 2000). Naveh-Benjamin and colleagues found
that older adults had increased difficulty remembering
pairs of unrelated words in comparison with item mem-
ory for the words themselves, noting that this selective
association deficit could not be accounted for by a simple
decrease in attentional resources, which would predict a
general memory impairment for both types of informa-
tion (Naveh- Benjamin, Guez, & Shulman, 2004; Naveh-
Benjamin, Hussain, Guez, & Bar-On, 2003).
947 Copyright 2008 Psychonomic Society, Inc.
Effects of adult aging on utilization
of temporal and semantic associations
during free and serial recall
JU L I E D. GO L O M B , JO N A T H A N E. PE E L L E , A N D KE L LY M. AD D I S
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
MI C H A E L J. KA H A N A
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A N D
AR T H U R WI N G F I E L D
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
Older adults show poorer performance than young adults at word list recall, especially for order information.
In contrast with this temporal association deficit, older adults are generally adept at using preexisting semantic
associations, when present, to aid recall. We compared the use of temporal and semantic associations in young
and older adults’ word list recall following both free recall and serial recall instructions. Decomposition of serial
position curves confirmed that older adults showed weakened use of temporal context in recall in relation to
young adults, a difference that was amplified in serial recall. Older adults’ temporal associations were also less
effective than young adults’ when correlated with serial recall performance. The differential age decrement for
serial versus free recall was accompanied by a persistent influence of latent semantic associations in the older
adults, even when maladaptive for serial recall.
Memory & Cognition
2008, 36 (5), 947-956
doi: 10.3758/MC.36.5.947
A. Wingfield, wingfield@brandeis.edu

948 GO L O M B , PE E L L E , AD D I S , KA H A N A , A N D WI N G F I E L D
also be making use of potential semantic associations
among list items, as well as how the use of semantic infor-
mation might vary with age and task demands. This ques-
tion follows the classic distinction often made between
episodic and semantic memory (Tulving, 1983). Exten-
sive research has documented older adults’ difficulties in
episodic memory (Bäckman et al., 2001; Burke & Light,
1981; Kausler, 1994; Salthouse, 1991), but semantic mem-
ory tends to be relatively spared (Burke & Mackay, 1997).
Using categorizable word lists, Wingfield, Lindfield, and
Kahana (1998) demonstrated that both young and older
adults tend to recall words clustered by semantic category
(Bousfield, 1953), although older adults have more diffi-
culty accessing the relevant categories. These findings led
Wingfield and Kahana (2002) to formulate a hypothesis
distinguishing between the ability to use preexperimental
semantic associations, which is relatively spared in older
adults, and the marked deficit in older adults’ ability to use
temporal associations, which must be created on line for
any given word list.
We sought to test this hypothesis by using uncatego-
rized word lists, in which temporal associations between
list words would be more valuable during recall than any
latent semantic associations that might happen to exist on
a given list. During free recall tasks, we might expect par-
ticipants to use a mixture of temporal and semantic asso-
ciations. To succeed at serial recall, however, participants
should shift to a temporally dominant strategy and make
less use of potential semantic associations. We used two
analyses to examine young and older adults’ utilization of
temporal context in list recall. One of these was the prob-
ability that an item from any given position in a presented
list would be the first item to be recalled, as an indicator of
participants’ patterns of initiating recall. We refer to this
measure as the probability of first recall (PFR; Laming,
1999). The second analysis examined the probability of an
item being recalled as a function of its distance, either ear-
lier or later in the presented list, from the item previously
recalled. We refer to this as the lag–conditional response
probability (lag–CRP), and we used this measure to assess
temporal transitions made during recall and the strength of
the contiguity effect (Howard & Kahana, 1999; Kahana,
1996). In addition to obtaining these two measures, we
also explored whether the strength of these temporal as-
sociations was correlated with overall recall accuracy for
either task or age group. To probe semantic organization,
we examined conditional response probability in terms of
latent semantic associations between list items (semantic–
CRP; Howard & Kahana, 2002b). These techniques are
not new, but this is the first time these techniques have
been used to compare associative abilities across age and
task demands.
As a final factor, we also varied presentation rates for
word list items. Our reason for testing different presenta-
tion rates was based on previous research showing that
older adults are differentially impaired at recall, in com-
parison with young adults, when words are presented at
faster rates (Kausler, 1994). Previous research has also
shown, at least in young adults, that presentation rate se-
lectively affects recall of pre-recency items (Glanzer &
To examine the use of associations in word list recall,
Howard and Kahana (1999) described recall performance
in terms of two elements: how participants initiate recall
and how they make transitions between items once the
recall has begun. During free recall tasks, young adults
tend to begin recall with items occurring near the end of
the list (Howard & Kahana, 1999), as first noted by Deese
and Kaufman (1957). When transitioning between items
in recall, young adults display a characteristic pattern in
which items that occurred together during presentation
are more likely to be recalled together than are items that
were presented farther apart; this is called the contiguity
effect (Kahana, 1996). This effect is asymmetric, favoring
forward associations over backward associations (Howard
& Kahana, 1999; Kahana, 1996). When these analyses
were extended to older adults, the differentiation between
these two processes was striking: The manner in which
participants initiated recall was entirely unaffected by age,
whereas older adults exhibited significantly decreased
contiguity, illustrating a deficit in temporal organization
(Howard et al., 2006; Kahana et al., 2002; Wingfield &
Kahana, 2002).
Studies of recall and aging often use free recall tasks, in
which memorized items from a list can be recalled in any
order (e.g., Wingfield & Kahana, 2002). Although tempo-
ral organization of items may aid a participant during free
recall, temporal organization is clearly more important
for serial recall, in which task demands necessitate recall-
ing list items in the order in which they were presented.
It is important to note that the temporal organization we
refer to here is based on the temporal order of list items—
that is, the temporal context of an item with respect to
another item (temporal context model; Howard & Ka-
hana, 2002a), not with respect to the absolute amount of
time passed, which has little effect on serial recall (Lew-
andowsky, Brown, Wright, & Nimmo, 2006). Because
older adults appear to show weaker temporal organization
during free recall, one might expect them to find the se-
rial recall task particularly difficult. Interestingly, whereas
a large number of studies have examined free recall and
aging (see, e.g., Burke & Light, 1981; Craik, 1977; Zacks
et al., 2000), few have looked at serial recall and aging,
and none have conducted a comparison of free and serial
recall in older adults within a single experiment.
In the present experiment, we compared age-related
changes in temporal associations during task conditions
in which temporal organization was largely incidental
(free recall) with those in which temporal organization
was largely intentional (serial recall). It is possible that
the decreased temporal organization seen in older adults is
restricted to circumstances of incidental encoding, or that
older adults use a different strategy—one that deempha-
sizes order information in order to maximize older adults’
limited storage capacity for item information. By requir-
ing both young and older adults to adopt a strategy that
emphasizes the encoding of temporal order information,
we can further probe the nature of this temporal associa-
tion deficit in older adults.
In addition to examining temporal associations, we
wished to determine the extent to which participants may