Why does life speed up? The impact of cognitive aging

Abstract

Why does life speed up as we age? Research on the impact of cognitive aging on personal memories is examined including declines in working memory, long-term memory, processing speed, processing resources and inhibition of unnecessary information. Attentional resources and distinctive processing decline. Life speeds up as we age because our strongest memories occur earlier in our lives. Events occurring in late adulthood simply do not undergo the same scrutiny of encoding, storage and retrieval as earlier life events. Research in this field informs both teachers and students as to the best ways to shape the adult learning experience. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.