LEARNING OBJECTIVES • What are the major types of memory self­evaluations? • What age differences have been found in metamemory? • How do younger and older adults compare on memory monitoring tasks? How is task experience important? E ugene has just reached his 70th birthday. How­ever, he is greatly concerned. He has believed since he […]

As indicated by the Adams research placing mem­ory in a social context, in many situations, older adults perform quite well at memory tasks. In addi­tion, a number of cognitive reserve factors, such as IQ, educational level, occupation, and activity levels, may enhance cognitive functioning as we grow older (Scarmeas & Stern, 2003; Valenzuela & Sachdev, […]

One area that has received increasing attention is prospective memory. Prospective memory involves remembering to perform a planned action in the future (Henry et al., 2004; Zacks et al., 2000), such as remembering to take medication. The study of prospective memory is a good illustration of how performance on everyday memory tests stacks up to […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • What age differences are there in prospective memory? • What are some factors that help preserve memory as we grow older? T yler, an elderly man of 80, has been exercising his memory abilities since he reached his 60th birth­day. He has made sure to read voraciously, has done his crossword puzzles […]

The Influence of Social Contexton Memory Performance Attention and Memory 211 Overall, both younger and older adults construct and update situation models similarly (Dijkstra et al., 2004; Radvansky et al., 2003; Zacks et al., 2000) . For example, Morrow and colleagues (1997) had older and younger adults memorize a map of a building in which […]

Sometime in your educational career you probably had to read a rather lengthy novel for a literature class. Providing you opted for the book rather than the video or Cliff Notes version, you probably were surprised at how much different your recol­lections of the story were compared with those of your classmates. Many of these […]

Most of the work conducted in aging and discourse processing has examined memory at text-based lev­els. Because texts are constructed with information at these different hierarchical levels of importance, a key question is whether there are age differences in memory for these different levels. Answering this question amounts to looking for age differences between memory […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • What age differences are observed in text-based levels of memory for discourse? • What age differences are observed for situation models of discourse memory? • What social factors and characteristics of individuals influence memory for discourse? A n elderly woman, Dorothy, loves the movies. In fact, her adult children go to her […]

How Do We Explain False Memories? Larry Jacoby (1999) asks the question: What causes the effect in the "I-told-you" claim? Does the claim create a false memory? From this perspective, exposure to misleading questions about an event can result in a permanent loss from memory of details of the actual experience (Loftus, 1975). In other […]

The fact that older adults exhibit the false-fame effect to a greater degree than younger adults suggests that although familiarity is intact, conscious recollection is not, thus allowing familiarity to misinform the older adult’s performance. Two other recent areas of research have further explored older adults’ suscep­tibility to misinformation due to memory deficits: source memory […]