Older individuals have been reported to use imagery mediation less in remembering verbal material. To determine whether this is due to decrease in the speed with which verbal stimuli are recoded into pictorial representations, the reaction time of 12 old (63-78) and 12 young (17-25) subjects for matching verbal descriptions to geometric shapes was…

Children and adults were more likely to claim a word was presented as a picture than vice versa. Results indicated the absence of developmental differences in reality monitoring and similarity in representational processes of children and adults. (BC)