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The short literature overview is organized around the idea that during our life course there is a classic competition between accumulated experience and the increased metacognitive reflection possibilities as the positive side, and the rusting of fast mental processes, mental slowdown with age as a negative side. This is non trivially crossed by the issue that in language, grammar corresponds to the early stabilizing procedural system, while vocabulary is a system that remains open during all our life regarding its acquisition, but shows signs of access problems due to the age sensitivity of the declarative memory system. Language and speech in this regard as well are subject to multiple determination: different age parameters characterize its acquisition and usage. I show some summaries of age related changes in grammar, vocabulary, and articulation. The review specifically discusses the possible role of age related in memory and executive functions during physiological ageing. In this domain as well, the new IT system brought in new environmental and research method challenges.

The paper is partly a review of a new book by Brady Wagoner on Frederick Bartlett as a theoretician of constructive memory, and partly a survey of what has become of memory constructionism. The basic message of Wagoner analyzing Bartlett is that constructive memory processes are not the exception but the rule. The details of the reemergence of this memory model in modern cognitive psychology are clearly presented by Wagoner. One crucial point is missing, however, that is analyzed in detail by the paper. Bartlett was using stories to support his contructionist theory. This attitude was coming up in the rediscovery of Bartlett as a narrative interpretation of memory schematization. New structural approaches to stories have been emerging in the work of Colby, Rumelhart, and others. Like Bartlett, they were looking for underlying social schematization and constraints, but this time round, there was a stronger linguistic and even structural emphasis. Narrative patterns promised to provide a substantial anchoring point for the otherwise elusive concept of schemata proposed by Bartlett. This turn affiliates memory schematization with theories that treat elementary sociality as a basic, not constructed feature of the human mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the impact of readers' visuo-spatial (VS) capacity on their incidental learning of page links during the exploration of simple hierarchical hypertextual documents. Forty-three university students were asked to explore a series of hypertexts for a limited period of time. Then the participants were asked to recall the layout and the contents of the pages. We found that low VS capacity readers had more difficulty recalling the links located at a deeper level in the page hierarchy. A content map included in half the trials had a limited effect on recall accuracy. We conclude that reading networked digital documents taps VS working memory, possibly due to readers’ attempts to construct a topological representation of the network that coexists with the semantic representation of the contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]