Efficient memory is one of the necessary cognitive potentials required for virtually every form of lifelong learning. In this contribution we first briefly review and summarize state of the art of knowledge on memory and related cognitive functions in normal aging. Then we critically discuss a relatively short inventory of clinical, psychometric,…

Memory studies involving older adults have typically been conducted in laboratory settings and have usually employed experimental tasks. Most results support cognitive decline. Most naturalistic experimental studies relate to spatial memory and test younger respondents. When older respondents are tested, the old sometimes outperform and sometimes…

When presented with linguistic material, elderly adults are often unable to report as much material as are younger people. To ascertain whether elderly adults are as sensitive as young adults to the underlying structure of the to-be-remembered sentences, a study was conducted using the item recognition priming technique. In this technique, people…

Elderly subjects and college-age subjects were compared on the strategy used to answer a question based on information in memory. The two strategies studied were direct retrieval and plausibility. The first experiment tested the hypothesis that older subjects will rely on the plausibility strategy more than young subjects. A second experiment…

Recent research has demonstrated that spatial memory in young and elderly adults depends upon the context in which items to be remembered are placed. Contexts in which cues to location are distinctive and heterogeneous have been found to be associated with better object location memory for both age groups. In this study, the relative contributions…

Training older persons to use memory strategies and mnemonic techniques derived from an information processing model of memory has resulted in improvements in performance on specific tasks. Some studies have also shown that the elderly are less likely to use memory techniques than younger persons and that it is the use of techniques that best…

Earlier research (Thorson, et al., 1976) found that latencies increase for acoustically confusable letter pairs and decrease for visually confusable letter pairs as a positive function of interstimulus interval (ISI). To extend these findings to different age groups, 30 young adults (mean age, 21.4 years) and 30 older adults (mean age, 68.8 years)…

Four groups of well-functioning senior citizens (6 males and 18 females per group) over the age of 65 were presented with a series of discrimination-learning problems. All were provided four pretraining problems, appropriate to their individual condition, and encouraging self-pacing. Two levels of problem complexity (four-dimensional vs.…

Self-efficacy, or a person's perception of his/her own mastery of a skill, affects subsequent task performance and predictions of future performance. To examine older adults' metamemorial knowledge with respect to predicting their performance on everyday and laboratory memory tasks, 28 adults (22 females, 6 males), aged 58 to 80 years, completed a…

Although studies using recall tasks to measure memory typically report age-related declines in performance for older subjects, little is known about how these research results relate to performance in actual situations. A study was undertaken to determine whether years of experience in a domain of knowledge could compensate for age-related…

Depression is regarded as the most prevalent mental health disorder in the elderly. Reminiscence, a normative and universal process which can facilitate the resolution, integration, and reorganization of past conflicts can have positive or negative effects on depression. One environment where the elderly are particularly at risk for the negative…

Recent studies of contextual attributes thought to be automatic have reported deficits among the elderly, raising the question of whether automatic memory processing does require some effortful attention and if so, whether such effort is needed during encoding, storage, or retrieval. This study used a secondary task methodology to examine these…

Previous studies of the effect of age and modality on digit span task performance have yielded inconsistent results. To eliminate some of the methodological difficulties in prior research, 18 college students and 18 older adults were given the digit span task by means of three different modalities: (1) visual successive; (2) visual simultaneous;…

Research has shown that older persons who have become widowed after many years of marriage maintain deep attachments to their deceased spouses. Case histories, observations and interviews were used to explore some aspects of the persistence of the marital tie after the first few years of mourning had passed. The major element in this tie was…

Deficits involving metamemory (knowledge about memory) were investigated for elderly individuals in unfamiliar laboratory tasks. In Experiment I, 23 college age subjects and 23 active, community dwelling elderly subjects, roughly matched on socioeconomic status, were given a picture span estimation task, a test of actual span, and then a recall…