Psychology and Aging

2016, Vol. 31, No. 3, 249 254

2016 American Psychological Association

0882-7974/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pag0000077

BRIEF REPORT

Effects of Age and Environmental Support for Rehearsal on Visuospatial

Working Memory
Lindsey Lilienthal, Sandra Hale, and Joel Myerson

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This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

Washington University in Saint Louis

The present study investigated whether older adults visuospatial working memory shows effects of
environmental support for rehearsal similar to those observed in young adults (Lilienthal, Hale, &
Myerson, 2014). When the duration of interitem intervals was 4 s and participants had sufficient time to
rehearse, location memory spans were larger in both age groups when environmental support was present
than when support was absent. Critically, however, the age-related difference in memory was actually
larger when support was provided, suggesting that young and older adults may differ in their rehearsal
of to-be-remembered locations.
Keywords: visuospatial working memory, environmental support, age differences, aging

It has been suggested that the presence of environmental support

during memory tasks may be particularly beneficial for older
adults because they have a specific deficit in self-initiated processing (e.g., Craik, 1994; Hasher & Zacks, 1979). Lindenberger and
Mayr (2014) recently highlighted the need to pay closer attention
to the shift from self-initiated processing to reliance on external
cues that is hypothesized to underlie the differential benefits of
environmental support in order to design more aging-friendly
environments. Consistent with this hypothesized shift, a number of
studies, including some conducted using visuospatial materials,
have found that the presence of environmental support reduced or
eliminated age-related differences in memory (e.g., Craik & McDowd, 1987; Sharps & Gollin, 1987; Smith et al., 1990; for a
review, see Morrow & Rogers, 2008). For example, Smith et al.
(1990) found that although young adults were better than older
adults at correctly recognizing pictures for which environmental
support at encoding was presumed to be low, the age-related
difference was eliminated for pictures for which environmental
support was high (although it should be noted that some studies of
environmental support report an opposite pattern; e.g., Cherry &
Park, 1993; Craik & Byrd, 1982; Park et al., 1990).
Most of the previous research on environmental support in memory
tasks has investigated support for encoding, retrieval, or both. Lilienthal, Hale, and Myerson (2014) extended the concept of environmental support to visuospatial rehearsal, a process that is thought to
involve eye movements and attention shifts to to-be-remembered
locations (e.g., Awh, Jonides, & Reuter-Lorenz, 1998; Godijn &
Theeuwes, 2012; Tremblay, Saint-Aubin, & Jalbert, 2006). When
memory tasks include an interpolated secondary task or lists of more
than four to-be-remembered items, it is widely assumed that to-beremembered items are displaced from primary memory and, at test,
must be retrieved from secondary memory (e.g., Unsworth & Engle,
2007). Importantly, McCabe (2008) reported that when participants
were given opportunities to rehearse during a verbal working memory
task, retrieval from secondary memory was improved, perhaps be-

The amount of support for cognitive processing provided by the

environment is widely believed to be an important determinant of
memory performance (e.g., Craik, 1994; Craik & Jennings, 1992;
Lindenberger & Mayr, 2014). The term environmental support
originally was used to describe situations in which the context
present at the time of retrieval was similar to the context that had
been present at encoding, thereby reducing the need for selfinitiated, effortful processing during retrieval. For example, recognition tasks tend to provide more environmental support than
recall tasks because participants are able to rely more heavily on
cues present in the environment at retrieval, decreasing the need
for active reconstruction (e.g., Craik, 1986; Craik & McDowd,
1987).
Most research on environmental support has examined its effects on verbal memory, but a few studies have extended the
concept to the visuospatial domain, using the term to describe
several different manipulations of visuospatial memory materials.
For example, Smith, Park, Cherry, and Berkovsky (1990) manipulated environmental support by varying the amount of visual
detail and propositional content present in to-be-remembered pictures, and Sharps and Gollin (1987) manipulated environmental
support by varying the complexity of the environment in which
to-be-remembered location object pairs were placed (see also
Park, Cherry, Smith, & Lafronza, 1990). Each of these studies
reported that visuospatial memory was generally better in situations in which support was presumed to be greater.

This article was published Online First March 7, 2016.

Lindsey Lilienthal, Sandra Hale, and Joel Myerson, Psychology Department, Washington University in St. Louis.
This research was supported by National Institute on Aging Training
Grant AG00030.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lindsey
Lilienthal, who is now at the Department of Psychology, Penn State
Altoona, 3000 Ivyside Park, Altoona, PA 16601. E-mail: lcl5115@psu.edu
249

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250

LILIENTHAL, HALE, AND MYERSON

cause rehearsal served as a form of retrieval practice. It follows that if

environmental support influences how effectively participants can
rehearse, or the likelihood that they will do so, then environmental
support also should have important effects on visuospatial memory
performance.
Accordingly, Lilienthal et al. (2014) investigated whether visuospatial rehearsal, and thus visuospatial memory, was affected by
the presence or absence of environmental support during interitem
intervals. In two experiments, when environmental support was
present (i.e., participants viewed the array of possible locations
during interitem intervals), young adults memory spans were
significantly larger with long (4.0 s) interitem intervals than with
short (1.0 s) intervals, whereas when environmental support was
absent (i.e., participants viewed a blank screen during interitem
intervals), memory spans were significantly smaller with long
interitem intervals. Based on these results, Lilienthal et al. concluded that rehearsal of to-be-remembered locations using eye
movements or shifts of attention can prevent forgetting, and perhaps even improve memory performance, but only when environmental support for rehearsal is provided.
The present study represents the first investigation of the effects
of environmental support for visuospatial rehearsal on age-related
differences in visuospatial memory. The goal of the study was to
determine whether Lilienthal et al.s (2014) conclusions also apply
to older adults. Young and older adults completed a location
memory task in which both interitem interval duration (short vs.
long) and environmental support during interitem intervals (present vs. absent) were manipulated, as in the work of Lilienthal et al.
If environmental support for the rehearsal of visuospatial information differentially benefits older adults, age-related differences in
memory span should be smallest when environmental support is
present. Such a finding could have important implications because

although age-related differences are observed on a wide variety of

working memory tasks, the largest reported differences typically
are observed on tasks involving memory for visuospatial information (e.g., Hale et al., 2011; Jenkins, Myerson, Joerding, & Hale,
2000; Myerson, Emery, White, & Hale, 2003).

Method
Participants
Participants were 24 young adults (16 female; age M 19.0
years, SD 1.0, range 18 21) and 24 older adults (20 female;
age M 75.0 years, SD 7.0, range 66 87). The young adults
were undergraduate students at Washington University in St. Louis
who participated as partial fulfillment of a course requirement. The
older adults were community-dwelling residents of the St. Louis,
Missouri, area who participated in exchange for monetary compensation. Older adults were screened for cognitive impairment
using the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status, which correlates highly with other common screening instruments but does not
require face-to-face administration (Brandt, Spencer, & Folstein,
1988), as well as for significant health issues (e.g., stroke, Parkinsons disease). The average number of years of education was 12.9
years (SD 1.0) for young adults and 16.1 years (SD 3.6) for
older adults. All participants reported normal or corrected-tonormal visual acuity and English as their native language.

Materials and Procedure

In a single experimental session that lasted approximately 1.5
hr, each participant performed four conditions of a visuospatial
simple span task (see Figure 1) that were largely identical to the

Figure 1. Example trials with a list length of two from the task conditions with and without environmental
support. Interitem intervals were either short or long (1.0 s or 4.0 s, respectively).

task conditions used by Lilienthal et al. (2014) in their Experiment 1. In each of the four conditions, participants were shown
an array of 30 circles on a computer screen. Each circle was 1.0
cm in diameter, and the average distance between the centers of
the circles in the array was 1.75 cm. The circles were arranged
so that the array appeared unstructured, and the configuration of
the array was changed on each trial (i.e., a different set of 30
locations was presented on each trial). Then, on every trial, a
subset of the circles turned red one at a time and participants
were instructed to remember the locations of the red circles.
Each red circle (i.e., each to-be-remembered location) was
presented for 1.0 s, followed by an interitem interval that was
either 1.0 s or 4.0 s (i.e., either short or long), depending on the
condition. Following presentation of all the to-be-remembered
locations for that trial, participants were asked to recall as many
of the locations as possible. More specifically, participants
again were presented with the same array of 30 circles, now
appearing on a gray background, and were asked to use the
computer mouse to click on the circles that had turned red
during that trial. Participants were allowed to recall the locations in any order, taking as much time as they needed, and
were instructed to click on an icon labeled Done when they
were finished.
Each of the four conditions began with four practice trials,
followed by 22 test trials. List lengths (i.e., the number of
to-be-remembered locations on the trial) in each of the four
conditions ranged from 1 to 11, and participants completed two
test trials at each length. List lengths were presented in ascending order, so that participants first performed the two trials with
a list length of one, followed by two trials with a list length of
two, and so on. As in the work of Lilienthal et al. (2014),
memory performance was assessed in each condition using a
span measure, or one less than the shortest list length at which
both test trials were incorrect. It should be noted, however, that
the pattern of results did not change when a partial span
measure (Hale et al., 2011) was used instead.
Across the four conditions, two aspects of the interitem intervals
were manipulated: The duration of the intervals was either short or
long (i.e., 1.0 s or 4.0 s), and environmental support during the
intervals was either present or absent. When environmental support was present, the array of 30 circles remained visible on the
computer screen during interitem intervals, whereas when environmental support was absent, participants instead viewed a blank
screen (see Figure 1). Thus, one condition had short interitem
intervals with environmental support present, one condition had
short interitem intervals with environmental support absent, one
condition had long interitem intervals with environmental support
present, and one condition had long interitem intervals with environmental support absent. All participants completed all four task
conditions, and so the manipulations of environmental support and
interitem interval duration were both within-subject manipulations.
The order of the four task conditions was counterbalanced
across participants, so that each participant performed the conditions in one of four orders (with six participants in each age group
in each order condition). Half of the participants completed the two
conditions with environmental support present followed by the two
conditions with environmental support absent, and the other half of
the participants completed the conditions in the opposite order.
Within each of these two groups of participants, half completed a

251

condition with short interitem intervals first, and the other half
completed a condition with long interitem intervals first; however,
the interval durations were always presented alternately (i.e., either
short-long-short-long or long-short-long-short).

Results
Young and older adults memory spans in each task condition
are presented in Figure 2. A 2 (environmental support: present vs.
absent) 2 (interitem interval duration: short vs. long) 2 (age
group: young vs. old) analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a
main effect of age group, F(1, 46) 46.4, p .001, partial 2
.50, reflecting the fact that young adults spans were larger than
older adults spans. In addition, there was a main effect of environmental support, F(1, 46) 37.2, p .001, partial 2 .45, but
no effect of interval duration, F(1, 46) 2.3, ns; however, these
results must be interpreted in light of the significant interaction
between support and interval duration, F(1, 46) 24.5, p .001,
partial 2 .35. This two-way interaction reflects the fact that, as
may be seen in Figure 2, spans were smaller when interitem
intervals were long compared to when intervals were short, but
only when environmental support was absent.
Importantly, the ANOVA also revealed a significant three-way
interaction among environmental support, interitem interval duration, and age group, F(1, 46) 4.5, p .039, partial 2 .09.
Planned comparisons revealed that when environmental support
was absent, both young and older adults had significantly smaller
spans when interitem intervals were long compared to short: for
young adults, t(23) 5.0, p .001; for older adults, t(23) 2.1,
p .047. When environmental support was present, however,
young adults had significantly larger spans when interitem intervals were long, whereas older adults spans did not differ across

Young Adults

Older Adults

Memory Span

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AGE, ENVIRONMENTAL SUPPORT FOR REHEARSAL, AND MEMORY

Support Present
Support Absent

2
Short

Long

Short

Long

Interitem Interval Duration

Figure 2. Memory spans for young and older adults in all four task
conditions. The short and long interitem intervals were 1.0 s and 4.0 s in
duration, respectively. Error bars represent the standard errors of the mean.

LILIENTHAL, HALE, AND MYERSON

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252

interitem interval conditions: for young adults, t(23) 2.1, p

.045; for older adults, t(23) 1.2, ns.
To specifically address whether the presence of environmental
support reduced age-related differences in memory span, a 2
(environmental support) 2 (age group) ANOVA was performed
on spans only from the conditions with long interitem intervals.
Significant main effects of both environmental support, F(1, 46)
55.2, p .001, partial 2 .55, and age group, F(1, 46) 28.7,
p .001, partial 2 .39, were revealed. However, these effects
must be interpreted in light of the significant two-way interaction
between support and group, F(1, 46) 5.1, p .028, partial 2
.10. When interitem intervals were long, spans in both age groups
were significantly larger when environmental support was present
compared to when support was absent: for young adults, t(23)
6.6, p .001; for older adults, t(23) 3.8, p .001. Notably,
similar percentages of participants in both age groups showed an
increase in span when environmental support was present (79% of
young adults and 71% of older adults), but it was the young adults
who showed larger benefits of the presence of environmental
support. More specifically, the difference in memory span between
young and older adults was 0.87 locations when support was
absent, but this difference increased to 1.75 when support was
present (in Figure 2, compare the difference between the spans
indicated by the two white triangles to the difference indicated by
the two black triangles).

Discussion
The present study is the first to directly investigate the effects
of environmental support for rehearsal on older adults visuospatial memory spans. Young and older adults performed four
conditions of a visuospatial memory span task that varied in
interitem interval duration as well as in whether or not environmental support for rehearsal was provided during those
intervals. When support was absent, memory spans in both age
groups were larger when the intervals were brief and smaller
when the intervals were long. When environmental support was
present, however, young adults spans were larger when intervals were long, whereas older adults spans did not vary significantly with interitem interval duration.
Importantly, both young and older adults benefited from
environmental support when interitem intervals were long, but
the age-related difference in memory span was approximately
twice as large when support was present than when it was
absent, indicating that the young adults actually benefited more
from environmental support for rehearsal than the older adults.
This finding is clearly inconsistent with the commonly held
belief that environmental support reduces age-related differences. It should be noted, however, that environmental support
does not always reduce age differences (for a review, see
Morrow & Rogers, 2008), and older adults may differentially
benefit from support only when it reduces effortful processing
(e.g., Craik & Byrd, 1982). Even if support encouraged rehearsal in the present study, it may not have reduced the effort
required, and it is possible that this is the reason why older
adults did not benefit more than young adults.
Most previous research on age-related differences in the
effects of environmental support has focused on support during
encoding and retrieval. The present study, in contrast, sought to

extend the environmental support concept to a new area: rehearsal on visuospatial span tasks. Our results suggest there
may be significant age-related differences in visuospatial rehearsal and raise a number of interesting issues. For example,
even when provided with support, older adults may rehearse
locations less, or less effectively, than young adults. Visuospatial working memory declines at approximately twice the rate of
verbal working memory on both laboratory tasks (e.g., Hale et
al., 2011) and standardized span measures (Myerson et al.,
2003), and it is possible that age-related differences in rehearsal
play a role in this differential decline.
Moreover, visuospatial spans appear to decline continuously
with age (e.g., Hale et al., 2011), and it would be of interest to
know if the amount of benefit from environmental support in
young older adults differs from that in old older adults, as
might be expected if rehearsal plays an important role in this
decline. Furthermore, older adults may be at a disadvantage
when to-be-remembered series are presented in order of increasing difficulty (e.g., Lustig, May, & Hasher, 2001; Rowe,
Hasher, & Turcotte, 2008), as in the current study, and thus it
also would be of interest to know whether presentation format
affects the benefits older adults receive from environmental
support for rehearsal. Finally, future research should address
whether the presence of environmental support for rehearsal
influences whether people represent to-be-remembered locations in a global or configural way (e.g., Taylor, Thomas,
Artuso, & Eastman, 2014), and if so, whether there are any
age-related differences in this regard.
The present finding that in the absence of environmental support, both young and older adults visuospatial spans decreased
with increases in the duration of interitem intervals suggests that
the observed forgetting occurred because without support, the
likelihood or effectiveness of rehearsal was reduced. Moreover,
participants did not perform any secondary task during interitem
intervals, making it unlikely that this forgetting was due to interference. Instead, the present results provide evidence that decay
contributes to forgetting on visuospatial span tasks. Interestingly,
models of working memory that posit a role for decay do not
necessarily predict forgetting like that observed in the present
study, as well as in the work of Lilienthal et al. (2014), which used
similar procedures. For example, the time-based resource-sharing
model (e.g., Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004) posits that
forgetting occurs when attention is diverted from refreshing memory traces, but participants in the present study were always free to
rehearse or refresh the to-be-remembered locations. Although the
time-based resource-sharing model does not explicitly predict
what will occur when attention is available, exactly how and when
forgetting might occur under such circumstances is unclear.
The finding that when environmental support was present,
young adults location memory spans actually increased with
increases in the duration of interitem intervals replicates the findings of Lilienthal et al. (2014) and strongly suggests that environmental support can facilitate rehearsal of to-be-remembered locations. Moreover, this finding is consistent with McCabes (2008)
idea that rehearsal of to-be-remembered items during a working
memory task can serve as a form of retrieval practice, thereby
improving recall. Importantly, McCabes study focused on verbal
working memory, whereas the present results suggest that for

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AGE, ENVIRONMENTAL SUPPORT FOR REHEARSAL, AND MEMORY

visuospatial items, environmental support is needed in order for

rehearsal to increase memory spans.
Finally, we would note what appears to be a growing realization
in aging research that multiple mechanisms underlie many important cognitive phenomena, as revealed by the way in which agerelated differences vary across tasks and contexts (Lustig & Jantz,
2015; Morrow & Rogers, 2008). For example, Lustig and Jantz
(2015) suggested that in order to understand the mechanism(s)
underlying age-related differences in interference control, one
should not ask simply whether such differences exist, but rather
when are such differences observed and how do they arise. We
strongly agree, and believe that a similar situation may exist with
respect to both environmental support and working memory. That
is, the results of the present study should be viewed as part of a
larger pattern of age-related differences on working memory tasks
that reveals complex relations between age, environmental support, and memory domain on different tasks and in different
contexts.
For example, Oberauer and Lewandowsky have argued repeatedly (e.g., Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Brown, 2009; Oberauer &
Lewandowsky, 2008; cf. Barrouillet, Portrat, Vergauwe, Diependaele, & Camos, 2011), based largely on studies of working
memory for verbal information, that forgetting is the consequence
of interference rather than decay. As already noted, however, the
present findings reveal that, in the absence of environmental support for visuospatial rehearsal, decay also plays a role. Moreover,
Lilienthal et al. (2014) found that temporal distinctiveness did not
contribute significantly to the time-based forgetting observed on a
visuospatial span task similar to that in the present study (see also
Ricker, Spiegel, & Cowan, 2014), contrary to what is observed
with forgetting on verbal working memory tasks. These findings,
taken together with fact that visuospatial span declines approximately twice as fast with age as verbal span (Hale et al., 2011;
Myerson et al., 2003), indicate that age-related differences in
working memory reflect domain-specific as well as domaingeneral mechanisms.

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Received June 22, 2015

Revision received January 8, 2016
Accepted January 10, 2016

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