ElderWeb

A fascinating study done by Larry Jacoby of Washington University investigated the ways that younger and older adults remember things. The study found evidence that older people are more likely than younger people to falsely recall things from the past, they are less likely to be willing to say that they don't remember things, and they are susceptible to false "cues", as when someone insists they owe twice as much for something than the price they really agreed to.

In this study, researchers tested what happened when younger and older adults were given lists of things to remember. In one experiment, they were asked to recall the list, but told they could improve their score by passing if they weren't sure of the answer. In this experiment, the younger respondents were more likely than the older ones to say they didn't know the answer.

In other experiments, respondents sometimes were given false "cues" about what was on the list, and sometimes forced to come up with an answer if they weren't sure. In all experiments, the older respondents were more likely to have incorrect recollections of the list.

It will be interesting to see what other things can be learned from this line of investigation, but one suggestion is that people, as they get older, should probably trust their memory less and rely more on writing things down so they can refer to the facts later.

Most people over age 70 do a pretty good job of rating their own memory (an ability called metamemory), researchers report. When they don't, other problems may be present. The study, reported in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, was led by Dr. Carolyn Turvey from the University of Iowa in Iowa City. They researchers studied memory complaints in a large group of community-dwelling people at least 70 years old.

For the most part, formal testing of an individual's thinking and memory ability agreed with their self-assessment of memory. Those who inaccurately estimated their memory ability tended to underestimate their difficulties. Two factors strongly predicted the chance of underestimating actual memory ability -- elderly individuals who had difficulty in their daily functioning and those who were depressed were far more likely than others to complain of memory deficits, even when their memory tested normally.