AGING AND MEMORY - MECHANISMS UNDERLYING AGE-DIFFERENCES IN PERFORMANCE

Although it is widely believed that memory generally declines with age , in fact, age decrements occur for most, but, not for all, types of m emory. Age differences are always found for free and cued recall but a re rarely found for picture recognition, implicit memory and measures of verbal ability. Understanding the conditions under which age differ ences 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 acr oss different domains of memory can be accounted for by the amount of processing resource or mental effort required to encode and retrieve i nformation. Different conceptualisations of processing resource are ex plored and supporting data are reviewed.