Research Report The effect of age on word-stem cued recall: A behavioral and electrophysiological study Alexandra Osorio a,b , Soledad Ballesteros b, ⁎ , Séverine Fay c , Viviane Pouthas a a CRICM Université P. and M. Curie-CNRS UMR-7225-Hôp. de la Salpètriere, Paris, France b Department of Basic Psychology II, UNED, Madrid, Spain c UMR-CNRS 6234 CeRCA, Université François Rabelais, Tours, France A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: Accepted 3 July 2009 Available online 15 July 2009 The present study investigated the effects of aging on behavioral cued-recall performance and on the neural correlates of explicit memory using event-related potentials (ERPs) under shallow and deep encoding conditions. At test, participants were required to complete old and new three-letter word stems using the letters as retrieval cues. The main results were as follows: (1) older participants exhibited the same level of explicit memory as young adults with the same high level of education. Moreover older adults benefited as much as young ones from deep processing at encoding; (2) brain activity at frontal sites showed that the shallow old/new effect developed and ended earlier for older than young adults. In contrast, the deep old/new effect started later for older than for young adults and was sustained up to 1000 ms in both age groups. Moreover, the results suggest that the frontal old/new effect was bilateral but greater over the right than the left electrode sites from 600 ms onward; (3) there were no differences at parietal sites between age groups: the old/new effect developed from 400 ms under both encoding conditions and was sustained up to 1000 ms under the deep condition but ended earlier (800 ms) under the shallow condition. These ERP results indicate significant age-related changes in brain activity associated with the voluntary retrieval of previously encoded information, in spite of similar behavioral performance of young and older adults. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Aging ERP old/new effect Explicit memory Deep/shallow encoding Word-stem cued recall 1. Introduction In the present study, we investigated the neural correlates of explicit memory by using a cued-recall word-stem completion task in a group of high-performing older adults (with a high educational level and still professionally active), and we compared their behavioral and electrophysiological data with that of a group of young adults matched for years of education. The word-stem cued-recall task has received much attention during the last two decades and has been widely used to assess explicit memory in behavioral (e.g., Richardson- Klavehn and Gardiner, 1995, 1996)and electrophysiological studies (e.g., Allan et al., 1996, 2000, 2001; Allan and Rugg, 1997, 1998; Angel et al., 2008; Fay et al., 2005). The task involves two phases: study (encoding) and test (retrieval). In the study phase, participants are presented with a series of target words on which they generally have to perform a task which mainly implies either shallow (perceptual or lexical) or deep (seman- tic) processes. In the levels-of-processing paradigm, partici- pants are oriented to engage in either shallow or deep B R A I N R E S E A R C H 1 2 8 9 ( 2 0 0 9 ) 5 6 – 6 8 ⁎ Corresponding author. Department of Basic Psychology II, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Juan del Rosal, 10, 28040, Madrid, Spain. Fax: +34 91 2987958. E-mail address: mballesteros@psi.uned.es (S. Ballesteros). 0006-8993/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2009.07.013 a v a i l a b l e a t w w w. s c i e n c e d i r e c t . c o m w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / b r a i n r e s