ADULT AGE-DIFFERENCES IN LONG-TERM-MEMORY FOR PERFORMED ACTIVITIES

Participants in two studies conducted by Salthouse (in press) were cal led 2 to 182 days after participation and asked to describe the activi ties that they had performed in the previous study. Hierarchical regre ssion analyses were used to examine the prediction of activity recall from age, speed, and retention interval. Overall, age was associated w ith 20% of the variance in activity recall, and retention interval was associated with 19%, but there was no significant interaction of age and retention interval. When perceptual speed was entered into the reg ression equation before age, the age-related variance was reduced by 7 0%. A small, but statistically significant, amount of age-related vari ance in activity memory remained after controlling for speed and reten tion interval.