ABSTRACT
Age differences in cognitive function have been studied for many years, and of all the cognitive domains, memory has probably been studied the most. This rich literature has shown that older adults have particular difficulty with episodic memory, defined as the conscious recollection of events that have occurred in a person's experience (Tulving, 1983). In the laboratory, these age differences in episodic memory are seen in a reduced ability to learn and retrieve lists of stimuli (for a review see Craik & Bosman, 1992). Reductions in recall of real-life, autobiographical memories also have been reported (Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, & Moscovitch, 2002; Marchal et al., 1992). Age-related difficulties in episodic memory may be related to deficits in encoding new material (Craik & Byrd, 1982), as well as to reductions in the adequacy of retrieval (Burke & Light, 1981). Substantial age-related declines also are seen on working memory tasks (for reviews see Balota, Dolan, & Duchek, 2000; Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000), but semantic memory, or the accumulation of knowledge about the world, is maintained in older adults (Craik & Jennings, 1992).
