Aging and prospective memory : the role of cue familiarity
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Date
2009
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Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science
Abstract
Older adults often show age-related declines in retrospective and prospective memory (PM). However, when memory is tested in a way that allows for reliance on familiarity, age-related declines are eliminated. Recent research has indicated that on a number of tests of PM, no age-related memory deficits were found. It is hypothesized that such tests allow older adults to rely on familiarity to detect the PM cue. The current study uses a PM task on which reliance on familiarity will lead to a measurable error that can be distinguished from a general PM deficit. It is hypothesized that older adults will make more familiarity-based errors than younger adults while performing worse overall.