Older Adults Recollect Recent Incidents As Good As Young Adults

Memory deteriorates, as one approaches old age is not completely true, as the other types of memory do not decline as the capacity to recall specific facts weaken, report researchers.

In the experiment conducted for the research, the participants were asked to recall three facts from their personal lives. The researchers found that an individual - whether an adult or young person - has the capacity to remember information relating to facts in his/her private life in detail.

"The main difference between older adults and younger adults is that, the younger ones remember more episodic details. In old age, deterioration appears in episodic memory but not in semantic memory," said Alaitz Aizpurua, University of the Basque Country, Spain.

Semantic memory is related to language, to the meaning of concepts and to repetitive facts. "This type of memory - semantic - and procedural memory are maintained (in some cases they even improve) whereas episodic memory in which detailed memories are retained is reduced," said Aizpurua.

Episodic memory preserves the facts of the past in our personal life, and it is more specific in terms of time and space: we can remember the last time we went to a restaurant, who we sat next to, what we ate and so on.

The results stressed that, "No appreciable differences were found in the recollections of the previous month and the previous week, and the older adults were just as capable as the younger adults in providing episodic details relating to the facts."

Source: Medindia