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. Two recent studies of sentence retention in this laboratory demonstrated that amount of information forgotten over 24 hours was the same for young adult and old groups. In addition to comparing amounts of information forgotten, it is of interest to compare rate of forgetting for different age groups. In order to compare forgetting rates when two groups differ in amount of information learned (as is usually the ca in age studies), however, it is necessary to determine the forgetting function Then the parameters of the function can be compared. Hyperbolic functions. over time provided the best fit of all four of the forgetting curves for cued recall performance in the two studies of sentence retention. There is a rene interest in forgetting models among cognitive theorists, and a hyperbolic function is consistent with models of forgetting that include two or more components of performance that decline exponentially and are additive. These data are evidence supporting those models of forgetting that include additive components that decline exponentially.
