Age differences in memory for concrete and abstract pictures

There is considerable experimental literature showing that memory for complex pictures is relatively insensitive to age. Previous research has shown that young and old adults do not differ in their ability to recognize complex scenes. Other studies, however, using simple line drawings, do find age differences. This experiment investigated the possibility that the failure to find age differences with memory for complex pictures occurs because of memory support provided at encoding and retrieval by both the degree of visual detail (complex perceptual information) and the degree of propositional content (linguistic meaningfulness) that are represented in complex scenes. Pictures were shown to young and old subjects that differed in visual detail (complex vs simple) and propositional content (concrete vs abstract). The results indicated that age differences in picture memory emerge if the pictures are either deprived of visual detail or reduced in propositional content. THE vast majority of research on adult age differences inmemory has examined memory for verbal materials — stimuli that rely heavily on propositional representations. A smaller number of studies have been done with pictorial materials — stimuli that may also involve perceptual (i.e., visual-spatial) coding that is more isomorphic to the pre-sented stimulus than is the case with verbal items. The distinction between verbal and visual-spatial coding has been important in cognitive aging research because psy-chometric measures of cognitive functioning suggest that visual-spatial processing is more affected by normal aging than verbal-linguistic cognition. Larger age differences are found with performance tests, which are visual-spatial in nature, than with verbal tests (cf. Salthouse, 1982). With the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, for example, performance tests with heavy visual-spatial components (Object Assem