ABSTRACT
Older adults score lower on direct tests of memory, such as recall and recognition, which require deliberate recollection of specific episodes. In fact, Salthouse (1988) reported that the median of 22 correlations between age and memory in adult samples was —.33. Salthouse also assessed the magnitude of age-related memory decline by expressing the average scores of older groups in terms of the standard deviation of the younger groups to which they were being compared. He reported that for 67 comparisons, the median z score for older adults was -1.26. In other words, the average adult scored at about the tenth percentile of the young adult distribution in the studies Salthouse examined. Such results, however, should not be used as the basis for a generalization that older adults have a global memory deficit. There are many ways in which the effects of a prior experience may be expressed that do not involve deliberate recollection. When young and older adults are compared on these indirect measures of memory, age differences are generally small and unreliable, suggesting that there is a dissociation between direct and indirect measures of memory in old age (see reviews by Howard, 1988, 1991; Light, 1991).
