Aging Neuropsychology and Cognition 1382-5585/02/0904-276$16.00 2002, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 276±287 # Swets & Zeitlinger Age-Related Differences in Cued Recall: Effects of Support at Encoding and Retrieval Moshe Naveh-Benjamin 1,2 , Fergus I.M. Craik 3 , and Lilach Ben-Shaul 2 1 University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, USA, 2 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel, and 3 Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, Canada ABSTRACT The literature is unclear about the relative contributions of environmental supporting conditions to younger and older adults' episodic memory performance. The work reported addresses the conditions under which different support patterns are obtained. In three experiments, younger and older adults learned picture-word pairs and were then tested with a cued-recall task. Supportive conditions included semantic relations between thepairmembersallexperiments),and®rst-lettercuesforthetargetwordsatretrievalExperiments2and3). Results of the three experiments indicated different patterns of support for younger and older adults, depending on the number and location of the supporting conditions used. These different patterns are in line with the suggestion that whereas younger adults bene®t substantially from support at encoding only, older adults require support at both encoding and retrieval. Alternative accounts of the results are also discussed. There is general agreement that episodic memory performance declines from young to older adult- hood see Balota, Dolan, & Duchek, 2000; Craik & Jennings, 1992; Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000, for reviews). One way of accounting for such episodic memory de®cits was suggested by Craik 1983, 1986). According to this view, cognitive processing re¯ects an interaction between pro- cesses that are driven by external stimulation and those that are initiated by the individual. These latter processes are dependent to a great degree on availableprocessingresources,andmaydeclinein effectiveness as the person ages. Such decreases in performance can be reduced by minimizing the demands on diminished resources and maximiz- ing the contributions of external stimulation and environmental support. For example, a free recall task involves substantial self-initiated activity as relatively few cues are present in the environment. In contrast, recognition memory involves sub- stantial environmental support because the target item is re-presented. Results in the literature support this argument by showing much larger age effects on recall than on recognition Craik & McDowd, 1987). Pre-existing knowledge may also act to support the formation of richer encoded representations and to guide retrieval processes. Use of such knowledge in episodic memory tasks thus serves as ``schematic support'' Craik & Bosman, 1992) in a manner analogous to environmental support, and may also act to reduce age-related memory decrements. These ideas suggest that age-related declines in episodic memory should be reduced or even eliminated as the memory task involves greater degrees of environmental and schematic support. The empirical evidence relevant to these predic- tions is not clearcut, however. Although some studies show that more supportive conditions are indeed differentially better for older adults, other Address correspondence to: Moshe Naveh-Benjamin, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO 65211, USA. Fax: 1 573 8827710. E-mail: navehbenjamin@missouri.edu Accepted for publication: May 24, 2002.