The Effect of Age on Memory

Abdulkhaleq A. Al-Qahtani

Department of English, King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia

Keywords: Memory, Learning, Aging.

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the memory system and how it’s affected by age. Each type of memory

is also explained and divided into their sub-memories; for sensory memory, there are three types namely:

iconic memory for visual stimuli, echoic memory for aural stimuli and haptic memory for touch; for long-

term memory, there are procedural and declarative memories. After each memory type, the paper presents

information found in the literature as to how some aspects of memory are influenced by age. The conclusions

are as follows: memory is not affected by age as a whole system, what is affected are certain functions of

memory subcategories. For example, little evidence shows that semantic memory, procedural memory and

episodic memory are affected by age. In addition, encoding and retrieving information from and to long-term

memory are found to be influenced. The paper concludes with an assertion that most if not all age-related

deficiencies can be overcome.

1 INTRODUCTION

Aging has been perceived to have a direct impact on

memory loss. This perception is not grounded on

research findings but was rather associated with

anecdotes of aging people. As people age, they

become sensitive as to what abilities they have lost

and what they have retained over the passing years;

memory is one of those abilities. The observations of

aging adults are not fully refuted by research on

memory and aging. There seems to be a fair amount

of correlation between aging and a certain number of

memory functions (Merriam & Caffarella, 1999).

In order to understand how age affects memory,

one needs to know how memory works in the first

place. There are three main types of memory. i.e.,

sensory memory, short-term memory (sometimes

referred to as the working memory), and long-term

memory. Each type has its own constituent parts that

may or may not be affected by age either entirely or

partially. This paper will attempt to outline the main

types of memory and their subsections and explore in

the light of research findings how each and every type

might be affected by age.

2 SENSORY MEMORY

This type of memory is the first part of the

memory system where information is first perceived.

The name sensory is connected directly to the

function of this type of memory, the senses. A sensory

memory is available for every sensory channel: iconic

memory for visual stimuli, echoic memory for aural

stimuli and haptic memory for touch. Here is how it

works; information is first encountered by the senses

sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. Then the

information is saved for a very short time from 1 – 5

seconds. Then the selected information is sent to the

next memory (the short term memory). Then the

function of this type of memory stops. The place in

the human brain in which information is saved is

called sensory registers. The information at this stage

is not processed (Matlin, 1998). At this point a

person decides which part of information is worth

further processing and which part is not through the

process of attention. It is worth noting that most of

the information received in the sensory registers is

filtered out of the system (Ormrod, 1995).

An example of sensory memory would be a key

word heard in a lecture after losing attention to what

the lecturer had just said that triggered a person’s

mind to get back to the lecture. Remembering the

word right before that key word is locating that word

in the echoic memory. Another example would be a

hearer’s attention to someone reading a sentence

when the hearer holds the words at the beginning of

the sentence until the speaker finishes to make sense

of the whole utterance. These words are held in the

Al-Qahtani, A.

The Effect of Age on Memory.

DOI: 10.5220/0008682601730177

In Improving Educational Quality Toward International Standard (ICED-QA 2018), pages 173-177

ISBN: 978-989-758-392-6

173

echoic memory and are not processed until the

sentence is uttered in full. A third example would be

watch someone/something move; the iconic memory

saves each snapshot of the moving picture and

connects it with the next before processing the whole

scene into a meaningful thought. It is just like the

pictures on a cartoon film where every picture is fixed

alone and then connected to the others to form a

motion on the film. Iconic memory retains

unprocessed pictures for a short while to connect

them to the rest and ultimately move on to the next

step in the memory system (the short-term memory).

The capacity of the sensory memory is not that

large (Ormrod, 1995). The fact that our brains can

take in large amount of information fairly accurately,

the length of time allowed in the sensory registers is

very short; and therefore, the maximum amount

allowed in this memory is almost one unit of

information at a time (Matlin, 1998). To be more

specific, iconic memory can only last for less than one

second, and echoic memory can only hold up to five

seconds. It is interesting to observe that the capacity

of sensory memory is measured by time not by space

or quantity (Salthouse, 1996).

From what is said about sensory memory thus far,

it is quite obvious that age could have a fairly strong

impact on at least two types of the sensory memories

namely the iconic and the echoic, but with lesser

impact on the haptic memory. Contrary to Merriam

& Caffarella (1999 )who argue that sensory memory

is not affected by age, as people age, they lose vision

and hearing more than other senses (touch, smell, and

taste). Thus, the amount received into the iconic and

echoic memories will be increasingly reduced, as

people grow older. On the other hand, the other

senses will remain intact, in most part, well into late

adulthood; and therefore, very little negative impact

may be ascribed to the haptic memory as well as the

registers for the smell and taste.

In sum, we cannot assert that the sensory memory

is affect by age because it is divided into sub-

memories, which are not all affected in the same way

or manner. Nevertheless, older people could make up

for such deficiencies by checking up their vision and

hearing and use aids to sharpen up these senses and

reduce aging consequences to this type of memory.

3 SHORT-TERM MEMORY

Short-term memory, sometimes called the working

memory, is the next step in the memory system right

after the sensory memory. What is working memory?

It is a limited-capacity store that can hold entering

information for a few seconds – it is what is in your

thinking at the present moment. This store works in

the following manner: through selective attention,

information move from sensory memory to short-

term memory; here, two factors are crucial: the

amount of information and the duration. The

maximum normal amount of information that an adult

can hold in a single time is seven items of

information, and the duration is roughly from 20 to

30 seconds. The items of information could be

isolated units like one digit number or chunks where

a group of related smaller units are lumped together

to form a one-item chunk. The items are maintained

in short-term memory by means of rehearsal.

The process of chunking is proved to be valuable

for enhancing the performance of sort-term memory

(Salthouse, 1996). One chunk, or example, could

include the three digit numbers of an area code in a

telephone number instead of storing the same chunk

as a three different digits. The one chunk in this case

counts as a single unit for the possible seven units

mentioned earlier in the maximum capacity of short-

term memory. Consequently the maximum duration

for normal adult could also expand as a result of

chunking.

Short-term memory has been proven to have

direct impact on language learning (Gathercole and

Baddeley, 1993), and people who have problems in

this type of memory exhibit learning disabilities.

Reading, for example, engages short-term memory

directly in the process. The reader needs to hold

chunks of read words for a short time to connect them

to the words following them and the words before

them. Any disturbance in the short-term-memory,

therefore, would result in reading difficulty or even

disability (Hulme and Mackenzie, 1992).

The influence of aging on short-term memory is

found in literature. The speed by which young vs.

older adults process information varies. Older adults

tend to process information in their short-term

memory slower than that of younger adults (Bors and

Forrin, 1995). Salthouse (1991) conducted a study in

which he employed the most common way of

assessing short-term memory, which is the digit-span

test. In this test informants are given a sequence of

numbers or letters and then asked to recall them.

Older adults perform well in the recall as well as

younger adults but when the older ones were asked to

manipulate the information in other ways like recall

them in refers order, younger adults outperformed the

older. Salthouse explained this phenomenon as an

indicator that older adults have a fragile short-term

memory.

Another research conducted by Swanson (1999)

found that there are differences between older and

ICED-QA 2018 - International Conference On Education Development And Quality Assurance

174

younger adults in the general capacity of two different

processes: accessing new information and

maintaining old information. In this study, older

adults are found to have more problems accessing

new information than younger adults. As for the

efficiency of the maintenance of old information, the

study did not support a significant difference between

young and older adults. Thus, age affects only certain

tasks of short-term memory but not the whole

function. Older adults have problems accessing new

information but once the information enters the

system, older adults seem to keep the new

information as well as the younger adults (Swanson,

1999).

In short, age-related issues found in the literature

suggest that only two aspects are found to be relevant:

the speed of performance and the difficulty of

accessing new information. As for the speed of

performance, researchers like Salthouse suggest that

the slow performance of adults might have to do with

the physiological aspect of aging rather than a

cognitive process. As for the difficulty of accessing

new information for older adults, Swanson and others

argue that that older adults experience a strict intake

of new information due to two reasons: poor sensory

registers’ input and fixed expectations of what should

be processed. It stands to reason, as I see it, that

people lose increasing amount of their vision and

hearing as they grow older and this process affects the

amount of input to shot-term memory. Also, people

develop expectations of the world and what to

encounter as they grow older and novel input might

be overlooked because it was not expected. In other

words, the new information did not fit in the

established pattern/framework that has been

established over the years.

4 LONG-TERM MEMORY

The third and the last type of memory is long-term

memory. Long-term memory is the final destination

for the information input. As the name suggests,

long-term memory saves information taken in from

one minute to many years for later retrieval. Unlike

working memory/short-term memory, information in

the long-term memory is not there in a person’s

present thinking. Information is organized in files

based on meaningful connections between units of

information.

The long-term memory works in two-ways

directions: storing/depositing new information and

retrieving information from the store. As for

depositing information process, information is

transferred to long-term memory from short-term

memory by means of encoding and/or elaboration.

The key component of encoding and elaboration

processes is the meaningfulness of information and its

relations to what the person has already established

(schemata). For example, one piece of information

would be much more easier to encode and/or to

elaborate if the person can relate that new information

to prior experiences/memories he/she had stored

before. The second process, which is the retrieval

process, acts in two processes either by recognition or

by recall. In both processes, the person has to attend

to what is really needed and where to find them

among the meaningful files. Recognition is less

troublesome because the person is given clues, but

recall demands more efforts to retrieve the needed

information.

Long-term memory is divided into sub-memories

based on the type and function of different kinds of

information. The known categories are as follows:

declarative memory or explicit memory, which is the

memory that people actively retrieve (recall and

recognize) and procedural memory or implicit

memory which we learn over time and then perform

tasks as needed without much conscious effort, like

reading and swimming (Anderson, 1996). Skills

learned/deposited in the procedural memory are hard

to learn and hard to forget like the example of reading.

Declarative memory in turn is divided into two

subcategories based on the functions of these

memories: semantic memory and the episodic

memory. Semantic memories are those memories of

general knowledge and subject matter knowledge we

learn at schools and in life at large. It contains

concepts, verbal information, rules, and problem-

solving abilities. Semantic memory stores

information in a form of schemata rather than images.

Episodic memories are those memories related to life

events that people experience as they live. Usually

this type of memory is organized around episodes of

our lives in a form of images. Usually it helps us

remember related information around events and

make sense of what had happened.

Having presented the major components of long-

tem memory, one would wonder how would age

affect this type of memory and which part is more

affected than the other. Research findings suggest

that not all types of long-term memory are affected in

the same way and at the same level. Procedural

memory, under normal circumstances, for example, is

not affected by age as the declarative memory. And

semantic memory is not affected by age as the

episodic memory. Episodic memory, in fact, is the

one that is found to be more endangered by age more

than any other memory type (Bee, 1996).

The Effect of Age on Memory

175

Shinkeigaku (1994) conducted a study to measure the

affect of age on episodic memory. The subjects of

this study were two groups of Japanese, aged forty to

seventy-five years. They were asked 85 questions

about public events that are familiar to their Japanese

culture. The events were scatted over four decades.

The researcher found that as age goes up informants’

performance went down (missed correct answers).

Older informants did not do as good as the younger

ones in both old memories – thirty years old events

and recent events – ten and fewer years old events.

The results of this study confirm that episodic

memory is significantly affected by age. Semantic

memory, on the other hand, is less affected by age

because older people exhibit better or equivalent

knowledge as younger adults (Bee, 1996). As a

matter of fact, older people have more robust

schemata than younger adults due to longer

experiences and accumulating meaningful input.

In sum, the two main problems usually

experienced by older adults due to age, as it applies

to long-term memory, are the two processes of

encoding and retrieving information. As for the

encoding issue, researchers have detected problems in

the process of encoding new information. They

ascribed such observation to the fact that older adults

cannot fit first-time new information in any existing

schemata; here the well-established schemata resist

encoding the new information for lack of finding a

suitable place for it within the space already

organized (Swanson, 1999). Also, retrieval process

is problematic for older adults. This process is either

recognition or recall. If the task requires recognition,

the age variable is not found significant: older adults

and younger adults function relatively equally.

However, recall process is found to be more difficult

for older adults (Bee, 1996).

5 CONCLUSION

In this paper, I presented the way in which memory

works as a means to understand age’s impact on

memory. In the light of recent research reviewed in

this paper, age does not affect all types of memory in

the same ways. As a matter of fact, there are certain

aspects of memory that are not affected at all, like the

procedural memory. However, age’s impact is

detectible in other types of memories in different

ways. For example, in sensory memory, people

experience decline in the perception system (sight and

hearing), which would affect the amount of input

saved on the sensory register.

Working memory is affect by age as a result of the

slowing down of the processes of receiving and

sending information to the long-term memory. Also,

it is affected by the fact that information in short-term

memory tends to decay more rapidly in older adults.

Long term-memory is more affected in the area of

episodic memory more than the two other types. The

explanation given in the literature ascribed such

observation to the two processes of encoding and

retrieving to and from the long-term memory. At the

encoding level, older adults are inclined to

deposit/encode new input in well-established manner

by which new information get subsumed under

certain existing category; if the category is not there,

then the encoding process becomes more difficult. As

for the retrieval process, older people tend to exert

more effort to recall information due to confusion,

interferences, and ill categorized information.

The good news is that most of the difficulties cited

in the research on the effect of age on memory are not

fatal. As a matter of fact, people can overcome such

difficulties by employing certain techniques. For

example, at the sensory memory stage, older adult

could sharpen their vision and hearing by using

prescribed aids. Working memory could be saved by

rehearsing and chunking items of information. And

long-term memory processes of encoding and

retrieval could be maintained by practicing recall and

connecting new ideas to existing knowledge. Other

suggestions to improve long-term memory retrieval

and encoding may include focusing attention on the

tasks, avoiding distractions, intending to put effort,

avoiding tension, and using external aids like a paper

and a pencil.

REFERENCES

Anderson, J. 1996. "ACT: A simple theory of complex

cognition", American Psychologist, 51(4), 355-365.

Bee, H. 1996. The journey of adulthood (3rd ed.). Upper

Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bors, D. A., & Forrin, B. 1995. Age, speed of information

processing, recall, and fluid intelligence. Intelligence,

20, 229-248.

Gathercole, S. and Baddeley, A. 1993. Working memory

and Language. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Hulme, C. & Mackenzie, S. 1992. Working Memory and

Severe Learning Difficulties. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates, Publishers

Merriam, S. & Caffarella, R. 1999. Learning in adulthood

(2nd addition). San Francesco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Matlin, M. 1998. Cognition (4th edition). Harcourt Brace

College Publishers, Orlando: FL.

ICED-QA 2018 - International Conference On Education Development And Quality Assurance

176

Ormrod, J. E. 1995. Human Learning 2nd edition.

Columbus, Ohio, Merrill.

Salthouse,T.A. 1996. The processing-speed theory of adult

age differences in cognition. Psychological

Review,103, 403 –428.

Salthouse, T. A. 1991. Theoretical perspectives on

cognition and aging. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence

Erlbaum Press.

Shinkeigaku, R. 1994. Influence of age on long-term

memory. PubMed, 34 (8), 777-781

Swanson, H. L. 1999. What develops in working memory?

A life span perspective. Developmental psychology,

35(4), 986–1000

The Effect of Age on Memory

177