The article “Aging and the production effect: a test of the distinctiveness account”, written by Olivia Lin and Colin MacLeod focuses on the issue of distinctive productiveness through saying words aloud and its benefits for improving the remembering among older adults. Taking into consideration various findings, the authors foreground the advantages of the production effect, which helps to recall and recognize said aloud meaningful words or material. The encoding and retrieval play also a significant function in improving memory. Moreover, the distinctiveness of the words pronounced aloud makes them easier to remember due to the self-production and comparison with non-distinctive words. Still, the decline in source memory, judgments of learning and reality monitoring among elderly can also aggravate the production effect and distinctiveness. Stimuli, which are considered to be the means to improve memory, often are insufficient and automatic. Therefore, the production effect of saying things aloud can be simple to perform and simultaneously efficient to boost memory. The procedure of the experiment, including study, recall and recognition is used to prove the stated above. In order to show the effect of distinctive production, the juxtaposition between the rates of recall and recognition of younger and older adults is applied. The findings show that in spite of the lower recall rates among older adults in comparison with the younger participants, recognition rates stay almost on the same high level, foregrounding advanced remembering of the silently read words. Therefore, the experiment highlights that due to the distinctive production of the words aloud the older participants showed advanced rates of remembering the words in spite of earlier discussed decline in remembering. Difficulties in monitoring memory appeared to be inconsistent in the described above case. However, a deficit in the use of distinctive encoding in older adults is the reason of the reduced production effect, which still has a beneficial effect, improving the memory of the older adults and being one of the successfully used mnemonic strategies.
The article under consideration presents a structured, well-organized and detailed literature analysis, concerning the topic of the research. Since the main issue of aging and production effect with the test of distinctiveness account has not been investigated before as the single problem, the review of the available research literature appears to be a solid theoretical basis for the current research. The authors analyzed such problems as interpolated recall and recognition, distinctive processing manipulations, the influence of age on the memory, pronunciation effect in recognition memory, the concept of distinctiveness, the associative memory, a false recall, recognition memory, etc. in order to include all relative theories and findings into their research and exclude secondary or insignificant information. The listed references show the deep scope into the subject, beginning with the pioneer investigation of Postman, Jenkings and Belbin and ending with the most current scientific contributions of Butler, Darley, Cardiger, Houriham, Rabinowitz, Ozubko, etc. in the field of experimental psychology.
The research under consideration belongs also to the sphere of experimental psychology and makes therefore the valuable contribution not only …