Abstract
MANY studies have shown that increasing age results in a deficiency in ability to acquire new skills and information. However, the commonly held view that older people manifest an impairment in the retention of acquired material has received equivocal support from laboratory investigations1,2. Even Inglis's recent demonstration3 of a loss with age in short-term memory is confined to an hypothesized storage system with a limit of approximately 4 sec. I wish to direct attention to the results of an experiment which suggests that the aged show special defects in the remembering of acquired material stored over longer periods of time. These defects seem to be due to a loss in ability to retrieve memories from storage rather than a deficiency in the storage system itself.
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References
Welford, A. T., Aging and Human Skill (Oxford Univ. Press, 1958).
Jerome, E. A., in Handbook of Aging and the Individual, edit. by Birren, J. E. (Univ. Chicago Press, 1954).
Inglis, J., Nature, 204, 103 (1964).
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SCHONFIELD, D. Memory Changes with Age. Nature 208, 918 (1965). https://doi.org/10.1038/208918a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/208918a0
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