Memory for activities for young, young-old, and old adults

Comparing older and younger adults in an event-based prospective memory paradigm containing an output monitoring component

Two experiments with younger and older adults were conducted to investigate the output-monitoring component of event-based prospective memory. In the standard form of the task, participants must remember to press a key when a certain class of items is encountered. To evaluate output monitoring, event-based cues were repeated and participants were asked to press a different key if they could remember that an earlier response was made to a particular cue. Younger adults forgot fewer of their successful responses, but displayed a distinct bias to claim that they had responded earlier when actually they had forgotten to respond. By contrast, older adults displayed this bias much less frequently. Elaborated responding to cues had the effect of improving the performance of younger, but not older adults. The results are discussed in terms of natural repetitions and omission errors that might be made in everyday prospective memory tasks.

Three-word recall in normal aging

Three-word recall tasks are widely used as brief measures of verbal memory function, although interpretation of performance is complicated by variations in test instructions and procedures. The purpose of this study was to examine 3-word recall performance in samples of healthy subjects aged 5275 (M age = 70) and age 7692 (M age = 82) compared to patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) when explicit prompts to remember the words were given. Those in the younger aging group remembered significantly more words than those in the older sample after a brief delay (M= 2.8 and 2.3, respectively). However, the majority of control subjects recalled 2 or 3 words after the delay, with only 3% of the 5075 year old group and 17% of the 76+ year old group recalling 0 or 1 word on delayed recall. This is in stark contrast to the 87% of individuals with AD who recalled 0 or 1 word. Even though 3-word recall performance decreases with age, good recall (2 or 3 words) can be expected in most cases of normal aging.