Age effects in a computational model of memory

Previous research demonstrates that semantic priming is relatively unaffected by age (Chiarello, Church, si Hoyer, 1985; Howard, 1988). To determine how age might affect representations in the HAL model of memory, the authors gathered text from older and younger adults and generated a global co-occurrence matrix for each. An analysis demonstrated that, as in humans, there was little difference in measures of semantic priming between memory matrices constructed from the two corpora. However, the authors discovered that semantic word neighborhoods generated by thc older adult corpus were denser than corresponding neighborhoods derived from the younger. adults corpus. This result has implications For changes in the semantic representation of words due to the aging process. (C) 2000 Academic Press.