Metamemory and Memory for Text Relationships in Adulthood: A

Participants in each sample were also presented with a set of text recall tasks. The recall protocols were scored according to the propositional system of Kintsch. Pearson product-moment correlations and stepwise multiple regressions within each age group and sample indicated several instances of age-related predictive patterns. In particular, whereas the recall performances of both younger and older adults was related to knowledge dimensions of metamemory, the performance of older adults was also predicted by affective dimensions. Key Words: Human development, Metacognition, Discourse processing, Aging ALTHOUGH several recent studies have ex- ^ amined the influences of a number of variables on the recall performance of adults for presumably ecologically valid text materials, this area of re-search remains relatively underexplored (see Hultsch & Dixon, 1984). Unlike the consistent adult age-related differences in memory perfor-mance found for tasks that require verbatim recall of list materials (Craik, 1977), the results of re-search focussing on developmental differences in memory for text materials are not nearly so sys-tematic. Several studies have reported significant age-related differences, with older adults recalling less material than younger adults (e.g., Cohen, 1979; Dixon et al., 1982), whereas several other studies have failed to find unambiguous age-related differences (e.g., Meyer & Rice, 1981; Simon et al., 1982). It appears that there are multiple factors interacting to influence age-related performance differences. One of these factors, metamemory, is considered in the present study. Text comprehension, when viewed as a continual process of encoding and semantic evaluation, is particularly related to the recently articulated con-'This research was supported by grants AG00910 and AG00048 from the Nation