Older and younger adults' memory for structured and unstructured events

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Abstract
Because the everyday memory demands of older adults often tend to be event-based, a complete view of memory functioning should include assessments of event memory. To this end 48 older and younger adults were asked to participate in one of two hierarchically structured events. They were tested for their memory immediately afterwards and again a week later. The procedural event was composed of a series of actions logically related and ordered in a necessary sequence to accomplish a goal. In contrast, the temporal event was organized with respect to locations and objects within those locations, but no logically necessary relationship or order existed among them. The results indicated that older and younger adults differed less in their recall of statements which summarized the event than in their recall of the actions composing the event. Both young and old benefited by the greater organization inherent in the procedural event but there was some tendency for younger adults to use this information more effectively. Thus, even memory for event-based information is susceptible to age-related decline but this effect appears to be influenced by the structural characteristics of an event.

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