Free time to attend to and process information in working memory is key in promoting immediate and delayed retention. One candidate process to cause this benefit is elaboration. We conducted three experiments with young adults – two of which included older adults – to investigate whether free time is used for elaboration, and whether elaboration causes the free-time benefit. Participants remembered lists of nouns, interleaved with short or long free-time intervals, or with filler words connecting all the nouns into a meaningful sentence to assist elaboration. For young adults, assisted elaboration through sentences, and the additional instruction to form a mental image, benefited performance in a working-memory test as much as longer free time, but not more. In contrast, for a delayed test of long-term memory, the benefits of sentence elaboration exceeded those of longer free time. Older adults did not benefit from assisted elaborations in the delayed test, providing further evidence that the long-term memory deficit of older adults arises at least in part from a deficit in elaboration. This elaboration deficit is not driven by a deficit in generating richer representations.

空闲时间来关注和处理工作记忆中的信息是促进立即和延迟保留的关键。产生这种好处的一个候选过程是精心设计。我们针对年轻人（其中包括老年人）进行了三个实验，以调查是否将闲暇时间用于精加工，以及精加工是否会带来空闲时间收益。参与者记起了名词列表，这些名词以短或长的空闲时间间隔交织在一起，或者用填充词将所有名词连接成有意义的句子以帮助阐述。对于年轻人来说，通过句子进行的辅助阐述以及形成心理形象的附加说明，使工作记忆测试的表现受益于更长的空闲时间，但没有更多。相比之下，对于长期记忆的延迟测试，详细句子的好处超过了更长的空闲时间。老年人在延迟测试中无法从辅助精雕细算中受益，这提供了进一步的证据，证明老年人的长期记忆缺陷至少部分是由于精巧缺陷所致。精心制作的缺陷不是由生成更丰富的表示形式的缺陷驱动的。