Free time to attend to and process information in working memory is key in promotingimmediate and delayed retention. One candidate process to cause this benefit is elaboration. Weconducted three experiments with young adults – two of which included older adults – toinvestigate whether free time is used for elaboration, and whether elaboration causes the free-timebenefit. Participants remembered lists of nouns, interleaved with short or long free-time intervals,or with filler words connecting all the nouns into a meaningful sentence to assist elaboration. Foryoung adults, assisted elaboration through sentences, and the additional instruction to form amental image, benefited performance in a working-memory test as much as longer free time, butnot more. In contrast, for a delayed test of long-term memory, the benefits of sentence elaborationexceeded those of longer free time. Older adults did not benefit from assisted elaborations in thedelayed test, providing further evidence that the long-term memory deficit of older adults arises atleast in part from a deficit in elaboration. This elaboration deficit is not driven by a deficit ingenerating richer representations.
Structural Anatomical Investigation of Long-Term Memory Deficit in Behavioral Frontotemporal Dementia
