ABSTRACT
An impressive amount of effort over the years has gone toward the study of age–related changes in memory, especially episodic memory. Episodic memory, or the conscious recollection of events that a person has experienced (Tulving, 1983), is thought to be the result of several stages of processing. The initial stage is encoding, in which the features of the incoming stimulus are analyzed and related to previously encountered information. The final stage is retrieval, in which stored information is searched for and brought to consciousness to be acted upon. Age–related difficulties in episodic memory thus could be related to deficits in encoding the to–be–remembered material (Craik & Byrd, 1982) as well as to reductions in the adequacy of retrieval (Burke & Light, 1981). One proposed reason for encoding failure in older people is that they are less able to initiate adequate encoding strategies or to organize material in their attempt to learn it (Hultsch, 1969; Sanders, Murphy, Schmitt, & Walsh, 1980). Using the well–known levels–of–processing manipulation (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975), or other methods to provide older adults with support for memory at the encoding stage, can result in smaller age–related differences in their performance compared to young adults (Backman, 1986; Craik & Simon, 1980; Park, Smith, Morrell, Puglisi, & Dudley, 1990).
