General Encoding of Episodic Events by Elderly Adults

Abstract

It is almost a truism that memory in older people is much poorer than memory in younger people. These performance differences are most often found in typical laboratory experimental tasks requiring recall (and sometimes recognition) of recently experienced episodic events. The most common tasks require recall of previously studied lists of words, paired associates, or sentences. Age differences in these paradigms are often profound and occur under a wide variety of conditions (see Craik, 1977).