Abstract
Much research has gone into understanding cognitive declines in aging. Using healthy young and older adults, we examined age-related changes in general and specific abilities associated with human memory and learning. ln Experiment 1, we examined age-related changes in episodic memory using free and serial recall for lists of unrelated words. Older adults made fewer correct responses and more incorrect responses, although these differences were fairly modest. The largest age-associated declines appeared when order information was taken into account, suggesting that older adults have more difficulty establishing or maintaining temporal context in list memory. These difficulties selectively affected recall for early and middle list items. Moderate changes in presentation rate affected both age groups equally. Experiment 2 addressed perceptual learning for time-compressed speech. We replicated previous findings (Peelle & Wingfield, under review) showing with repeated exposure to timecompressed speech, young and older adults achieve similar levels of improvement when equated for starting accuracy. We demonstrated that these same levels of short-term improvement can be achieved when intervening uncompressed sentences or pauses are presented during the learning period. However, age differences were revealed for long-term carryover oflearning. Whereas young adults showed consistent increases in baseline ability and rate of re-learning from week to week, older adults demonstrated no such pattern. We conclude that a large range of age-associated deficits and preservations exist in the domains of learning and memory. When combined, these deficits and preservations result in an overall effect of moderate decline in cognitive ability with age.