Everyday Memory

Laboratory studies generally provide evidence for a decline with age in everyday memory processes. One of the most complete studies was conducted by West et al. They found evidence for age-related declines on a wide range of everyday memory laboratory tasks. The tasks included requiring subjects to remember names, locations of objects, grocery lists, faces, telephone numbers, and news events. In another study, Frieske and Park studied older and younger adults' memory for news presented in a radio, television, or newspaper format. For all three formats, older adults remembered less information than young adults, and both groups fared best with television compared to the other two formats. Because television has both visual and auditory information, those dual sources of information appear to be supportive of memory for both young and old. These laboratory studies required older adults to learn unfamiliar material, and there is little doubt that the learning of new information, even if it is of the everyday variety, suffers with increased age.