Abstract
An on-line monitoring paradigm was used to investigate the effects of both age and semantic relatedness on the ability to monitor the capacity of working memory. Participants listened to word lists with instructions to interrupt the input at the point when their memory capacity has been reached. The point of interruption was compared with participants memory span to ascertain whether they selected an appropriate list length – an indication that they are able to continuously monitor the capacity of their working memory. When word lists were semantically related, both younger and older adults selected segments sizes that aligned with their recall ability. However, when presented with lists that were semantically unrelated, younger adults selected list lengths longer than their recall ability. However, older adults chose list lengths that better matched their recall ability. The present study suggests that younger adults’ monitoring ability is influenced by semantic relations, as semantic relatedness decreases effort required for encoding and recall, resulting in more better performance. Unexpectedly, older adults monitoring ability was not influenced by the semantic content of the word lists. From this we conclude that older adults monitoring strategy is both conservative and independent of the stimulus content.