Gerontologists have recently placed more emphasis on everyday or practical memory, to examine tasks that resemble the requirements of daily functioning. Investigation of everyday memory is needed because it allows scientists to confirm theories about memory based on laboratory investigations, to discover new variables or strategies that affect performance, and to reevaluate theoretical explanations for age-related changes in abilities. To reap these benefits, scholars must identify the critical differences between ecologically valid """"""""everyday"""""""" memory tasks and laboratory tasks, to determine if age differences are similar for the two task types. Accordingly, this research will examine the everyday and laboratory memory performance of younger and older adults on five tasks. This investigation will be based on a model that distinguishes memory tasks in terms of their contents, encoding conditions, and retrieval tests. Five tasks will be administered to 120 younger and older adults assigned to four conditions: Laboratory content, encoding, and retrieval; Everyday content-laboratory encoding and retrieval; Everyday content and encoding-laboratory retrieval; Everyday content, encoding and retrieval. The five tasks (list learning, location recall, paired associates, route learning and digit span) encompass a range of abilities, encoding modalities, and retrieval tests.
The specific aim of this research is to identify variables that affect performance limitations exhibited by older adults on the everyday or laboratory memory tasks, or both. It is hypothesized that age differences on these five tasks will be smallest in the last condition, the one most closely resembling an everyday task. The present study is seen as one part of a broader research program whose purpose is to develop measures of everyday memory ability, and to use the measures as assessment devices for clinical populations (e.g., alcoholics, dementia cases) and as a means to evaluate the effectiveness of training and rehabilitation programs aimed at everyday memory skills. An incidental follow-up study will compare incidental and intentional learning conditions on the two conditions which differed the most in the initial study in terms of age differences (hypothesized to be Laboratory content, encoding and retrieval, and Everyday content, encoding, and retrieval).
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