Researchers have concluded that the infant brain loses memories far more quickly than does the developed brain and that it lacks the ability to generalize to new events. Children under the age of five or six do not yet realize that learning is most effective when new information is associated meaningfully with other knowledge. Young children are similarly unaware that the intentional rehearsal or repetition of new information will enhance their ability to retain it in memory. As children age and develop language expertise, however, they begin to draw upon their semantic memory to help them remember words, facts, and events. They also grow increasingly aware of the ways in which memory serves them. This awareness of how memory works, known as “metamemory,” increases through much of adulthood. Aging
Older adults experience memory loss, but only for memories of certain types. Episodic memory (the ability to remember specific events) is typically the first type of memory to decline in old age; it is also the last to fully develop in children. Associative memory (the ability to learn, store, and retrieve associations between actions or things) also declines dramatically. In fact, a chief memory complaint among older adults is a decreasing ability to associate a person’s name with his face. Studies conducted separately by American psychologists Marcia K. Johnson and Larry L. Jacoby demonstrated that, whereas older adults are able to remember the gist of an action or event just as well as younger adults, they are unable to recollect the specific details that were involved. Older adults also have particular difficulty remembering the source of their memories, even in cases in which the information is familiar. Yet other types of memory are spared in old age—the most common among these being recognition. It is therefore common for an older adult to recognize a person’s face while failing to recall that person’s name. Jacoby’s work measured age-dependent distinctions between familiarity (recognition) and source memory (recollection) of a given event. His studies provided stronger confirmation that recognition abilities are similar in younger and older individuals, but as people age, they are less able to recall specific details of the events related to the familiar person or thing.
Age-related memory deficiencies can stem from a number of causes. Research in the 1990s by the American psychologist Timothy A. Salthouse suggested that age-related declines in working memory, and in the speed by which information is processed, can reduce a person’s ability to remember specific details of previous events. Changes in the brains of older adults, especially in the frontal lobes and hippocampal area, also may result in age-related memory deficits. More severe and widespread changes in the brain are related to the massive declines in memory functioning seen in Alzheimer disease, also known as Senile Dementia of Alzheimer Type or SDAT (see memory abnormality). This article was most recently revised and updated by Robert Lewis, Assistant Editor.
Citation Information
Article Title: Memory
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 18 April 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/science/memory-psychology
Access Date: August 22, 2019
Additional Reading
Endel Tulving and Fergus I.M. Craik (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Memory (2000), is an excellent reference work. Alan D. Baddeley, Essentials of Human Memory (1999), provides a reasonably comprehensive overview of the psychology of human memory; while Ian Neath and Aimée M. Surprenant, Human Memory: An Introduction to Research, Data, and Theory, 2nd ed. (2003), discusses methodologies of memory research. Two versions of formal models of memory are given in two essays found in Kenneth W. Spence and Janet Taylor Spence (eds.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: one by Gordon Bower, “Multicomponent Theory of the Memory Trace,” 1:229–325 (1967); and the other by R.C. Atkinson and R.M. Shiffrin, “Human Memory: A Proposed System and Its Control Processes,” 2:89–195 (1968). A comprehensive account of interference in long-term memory is provided by G. Keppel, “Retroactive and Proactive Inhibition,” in Theodore R. Dixon and David L. Horton (eds.), Verbal Behavior and General Behavior Theory (1968), pp. 172–183.
In contrast to works derived largely from laboratory studies, Alan Baddeley, Human Memory: Theory and Practice (1990), harmonizes laboratory studies with actual data from brain-damaged patients and is of value to advanced researchers and undergraduates alike. A balanced examination of memory for traumatic events, including the repressed memory controversy, is provided in Richard J. McNally, Remembering Trauma (2003). Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (2001; also published as How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: The Seven Sins of Memory, 2003), organizes a discussion of memory for the layperson around the fallibility of the memory system, with a focus on neuroscientific evidence.