Larry Jacoby and his colleagues (Hay & Jacoby, 1999; Jacoby, 1991; Yonelinas, 2002) found that memory situations involve both automatic and deliberate retrieval processes. They used a clever procedure called the “process-dissociation paradigm” to sepa­rate out the different contributions of each of these two types of processes in a memory task. To illus­trate, Jacoby and […]

For many years, researchers examining age differ­ences in memory performance have tried to impli­cate either encoding or retrieval as the source of memory processing. However, such attempts have met with mixed results (Zacks et al., 2000). As we will see, however, more recent work based on brain metabolism, automaticity in retrieval, and the social context […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • What evidence is there for age differences in encoding? • What age differences have been observed in retrieval? • What are the relative contributions of encoding and retrieval in explaining age differences in performance? How does a neuroscience perspective help us understand these contributions? • How does automatic retrieval affect age differences […]

When most people think about memory, they think about having to remember something over time, whether a few minutes or many days. Everyday life is full of examples—remembering routines, per­forming on an exam, summarizing a book or movie, and remembering an appointment. These types of situations constitute what memory researchers call long-term memory (Zacks et […]

In addition to short-term and working mem­ory, we can further divide memory systems into explicit memory (sometimes called declarative), which is intentional and conscious remembering of information that is learned and remembered at a specific point in time, and implicit memory (some­times called procedural memory), which involves retrieval of information without conscious or inten­tional recollection. […]

In this section we are interested in how information is kept in one’s mind for additional processing into long-term memory or is being held temporarily during retrieval. How this happens involves work­ing memory. Originally, this type of immediate memory process was conceptualized as passive short-term storage or short-term memory. The idea is that ind­ividuals have […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • What is working memory? What age differences have been found in working memory? Attention and Memory 193 • How does implicit and explicit memory differ across age? • How does episodic and semantic memory performance differ across age? • What age differences have been found in the autobiographical aspects of episodic memory? […]

Another way of looking at processing resource issues is through the lens of attention. In particular, divided attention addresses the question of how much information can be processed at any given time. Craik (1977) wrote that one of the clearest findings in cognitive aging research is the fact that older adults are more penalized when […]

One popular hypothesis is that older adults have reduced processing resources due to greater difficulty inhibiting the processing of irrelevant information (Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Persad, Abeles, Zacks, & Denburg, 2002). That is, older adults have more task-irrelevant thoughts during processing and have trouble keeping them out of their minds. This dif­ference could explain why […]

Another alternative theoretical explanation for age — related changes in cognitive functioning focuses on why older adults have more problems performing more difficult tasks, or tasks on which they have little practice, simultaneously? Many theorists and researchers believe that with increasing age comes a decline in the amount of available processing resources, the amount of […]