The influence of aging on short-term and long-term memory in the continuous recognition paradigm

Abstract

The continuous recognition paradigm was employed to examine age-related performance deficit in short-term and long-term memory. Three age groups of people: young, young-old, and old-old, participated in the study, which used words of high and intermediate familiarity With intervals used as criteria for separation of short-term (STM) and long-term (LTM) memory, hit rate and reaction time (RT) were computed separately. Although not significantly different in STM, hit rate in LTM decreased as the participant got older. No difference in RT for young-old and old-old groups was found for STM and LTM of high familiarity words, but the difference was significant for LTM of intermediate familiarity. RT was longer for intermediate than high familiarity words for both young-old and old-old groups in LTM, and only for old-old group in STM. These results indicated that although age differences in memory performance were not very large, different influence of aging on encoding, storage, and retrieval processes could be inferred.