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Ageing and Memory: Mechanisms Underlying Age Differences in Performance
Author(s) -
Park Denise C.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
australasian journal on ageing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.63
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 1741-6612
pISSN - 1440-6381
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-6612.1998.tb00867.x
Subject(s) - recall , cognitive psychology , psychology , cognition , reconstructive memory , cognitive aging , ageing , levels of processing effect , semantic memory , memory errors , developmental psychology , childhood memory , neuroscience , medicine
. Although it is widely believed that memory generally declines with age, in fact, age decrements occur for most, but not for all, types of memory. Age differences are always found for free and cued recall but are rarely found for picture recognition, implicit memory and measures of verbal ability. Understanding the conditions under which age differences occur and when they do not across memory domain is a challenging puzzle for cognitive ageing researchers. The hypothesis adopted here is that the magnitude of age‐related decrements in memory function across different domains of memory can be accounted for by the amount of processing resource or mental effort required to encode and retrieve information. Different conceptualisations of processing resource are explored and supporting data are reviewed.