Among the goals of this project are to describe adult age differences and changes in memory and learning performance and to investigate processes underlying such age-related performance. Several measures of memory and information processing known to be age related cross-sectionally were introduced into the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging in 1978. Six-year repeat data are now available for more than 200 men. Almost all of the measures of individual change in immediate and delayed memory of words, memory for digit sequences, simple reaction time, and speed and accuracy of decisions were related to age. The younger men tended to improve slightly and the older men tended to decline. The literature on verbal learning and aging is substantial and the findings are unequivocal; the performance of young adults is superior to that of older groups. Forgetting of newly learned verbal material has not been studied nearly so extensively, however, and the findings are inconsistent. Two age studies of sentence learning and forgetting were completed in this Laboratory this year. When young and other adults were given the same opportunity to learn many sentences, the typical age differences were found in learning; furthermore, the age differences were maintained 3, 6, and 24 hours after learning. The amount of forgetting was equivalent for the two age groups. When an older group was given more time to study each sentence, learning was equivalent for the two age groups; and the older group did not forget more than the young 3, 6, and 24 hours after learning. These studies provide further evidence that, for newly learned verbal material that is not mastered, forgetting is not age related.
