TY - JOUR
T1 - Can cognitive aging contribute to fundamental psychological theory? Repetition deafness as a test case
AU - MacKay, Donald G.
AU - Miller, Michelle D.
N1 - Funding Information:
Aspects of this paper were presented at the 4th and 5th Biennial Cognitive Aging Conferences, 1992 and 1994, Atlanta, GA. Support from National Institute for Aging grant #I R01 AG 09755 to D.G. MacKay and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship to Michelle D. Miller are gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank Manissa Pedroza and Ray Wong for research assistance, Lise Abrams for statistical advice and comments, and Art Wingfield and Deborah Burke for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Address correspondence to: Donald G. MacKay, UCLA, Department of Psychology, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA. Phone: 310-825-8465. Fax: 3 10-206-5895. E-mail: [email protected]. Accepted for publication: January 19, 1996.
PY - 1996/9
Y1 - 1996/9
N2 - This study concretely illustrates the Birren-Fisher strategy (1991), the use of well-established aging effects to understand fundamental but poorly understood phenomena in mainstream psychology. Our well-established aging effects included inhibition deficits and new learning deficits, and our poorly understood mainstream phenomenon was repetition deafness (RD), the reduced immediate recall of repeated words in computer compressed speech. Applying the Birren-Fisher strategy to RD successfully showed that RD is fundamentally similar to repetition blindness, that normal prosody eliminates RD for both young and older participants, and that age-linked connection formation problems cause RD, but not inhibition, perceptual fusion, or an absolute refractory period.
AB - This study concretely illustrates the Birren-Fisher strategy (1991), the use of well-established aging effects to understand fundamental but poorly understood phenomena in mainstream psychology. Our well-established aging effects included inhibition deficits and new learning deficits, and our poorly understood mainstream phenomenon was repetition deafness (RD), the reduced immediate recall of repeated words in computer compressed speech. Applying the Birren-Fisher strategy to RD successfully showed that RD is fundamentally similar to repetition blindness, that normal prosody eliminates RD for both young and older participants, and that age-linked connection formation problems cause RD, but not inhibition, perceptual fusion, or an absolute refractory period.
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U2 - 10.1080/13825589608256622
DO - 10.1080/13825589608256622
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0029843676
SN - 1382-5585
VL - 3
SP - 169
EP - 186
JO - Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
JF - Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
IS - 3
ER -