Effects of Age and a Divided Attention Task Presented During Encoding and Retrieval on Memory 1 By: Denise C. Park, Anderson D. Smith, William N. Dudley, and Vincent N. Lafronza Park DC, Smith AD, Dudley WN , Lafronza VN. (1989). Effects of age and a divided attention task presented during encoding and retrieval on memory. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn, 15(6), 1185-91. Made available courtesy of AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSN: http://www.apa.org/journals/pag/description.html This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. ***Note: Figures may be missing from this format of the document Remembering frequently occurs in the context of other competing activities. When trying to encode or retrieve information in everyday situations, we often do so amidst ongoing relevant and irrelevant information and concurrent events. This array of competing contextual stimulation may capture our attention and interfere with our ability to remember efficiently the information on which we would like to focus. In the present studies, we examined the effects of divided attention in a long-term memory task and looked at differences in the degree to which subjects of different ages were affected by this distraction. We were particularly interested in whether there were age-related differences in the effect of competing tasks during encoding, during retrieval, or during both. A great deal of research has been done on age differences in performance on working memory tasks (tasks that involve the processing of information held in primary memory) as a function of divided attention. A number of researchers have reported that elderly adults are more disadvantaged than young adults by the addition of a secondary task while engaged in a working memory task (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Salt-house, Rogan, & Prill, 1984; McDowd & Craik, 1988), particularly when the difficulty or complexity of the working memory task is increased. Others, however, have failed to find evidence for these interactions (Somberg & Salthous, 1982), even when complexity has been manipulated (Gick, Craik, & Morris, 1988; Morris, Gick, & Craik, 1988). Thus, there is some question as to the nature of the conditions under which such age interactions are observed, even in working memory paradigms (Gick et al., 1988). Research on the effects of divided attention on the encoding phase of long-term memory is more limited. Park, Puglisi, Smith, and Dudley (1987) reported little evidence that a divided attention task present at encoding affected old and young adults differently in a recognition paradigm. However, Puglisi, Park, Smith, and Dudley (1988) did find some evidence that elderly subjects were more disadvantaged than younger subjects by the addition of such a task during encoding with word recall as the dependent measure but did not find such a disadvantage for the recall of 1 Acknowledgement: This research was supported by Grant R01 AG060625 from the National Institute on Aging to the first two authors.