Abstract

According to Hasher and Zacks (1979), spatial location information is involved in the automatic processes which require minimal attention and is assumed to show no developmental change throughout the lifespan. Therefore, spatial location memory should come easily to the old as the young. The present study is based on Hasher and Zacks' developmental prediction and examines whether age differences are in memory for items and their spatial location. Young, middle-aged, and elderly women viewed a model of a city with 16buildings that placed on the display. The buildings were represented with or without an accompanying name label and with only name label. After studying the display, subjects were tested on recognition memory for the items and spatial memory for where the buildings had been located before. The results of this study are as following; (1) spatial locaiton accuracy declined with advancing age and the elderly women performed the least accurate relocation on all condition. But this developmental decline seems to come out in middle-aged; (2) for all age groups, location information was more accurately retained with verbal aspect of the stimuli ; (3) item recognition accuracy except name hit rates was similar for all age groups and overall name recognition performance was high; (4) compared with picture condition, the presence of the name label on each building picture significantly reduced picture recognition accuracy but improved relocation accuracy for all age groups. Especially, picture recogntion accuracy of elderly women was remarkably declined. The results of this study do not support Hasher and Zacks' (1979) developmental prediction.