A primary goal of this project is to describe adult age differences and age changes in nonverbal memory performance. Nonverbal memory is measured in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) with the Benton Visual Retention Test (BVRT), a test of memory for designs involving spatial memory. Spatial ability is one of the few aspects of cognitive performance in which gender differences favoring males have been reported frequently for children and young adults. When education was not taken into account in the analysis, comparisons of BVRT performance of men and women across the adult age span favored the men. However, when participants with and without a collage degree were analyzed separately, no gender differences was found.
