ABSTRACT
In 1978–1979, when I was a first-year graduate student at the University of Toronto, Gus Craik commented on a paper I wrote that, “Questions have to do with what aspects of the situation, the event, and the context require effort to integrate.” At the time, he was interested in the qualitative “aspects” of a memory, in particular, its semantic properties; I was struggling to understand the construct of “effort.” Neither of us, I believe, knew or had thought a whole lot about how various aspects of an experience might be “integrated.” Ten years later, however, at a conference celebrating Endel Tulving’s 60th birthday, Craik (1989) stated that “the integration of event and context is … of crucial importance in the understanding of memory processes” (p. 43). In the present paper, I am concerned with how various aspects of an experience are integrated and what cognitive and neural processes contribute to and ensure that integration. In particular, I argue that the processes necessary to integrate content and context decline with age as a result of reduced frontal lobe function, at least in a subset of older adults. Consequently, performance on memory tasks that are dependent on that integration—source memory, for example—shows corresponding declines.
