[Influence of age on long-term memory].
Memory for past public events having occurred between 1950-1989 was examined in Japanese subjects with average education aged forty to seventy-nine years. We compiled a public events test battery consisting of 80 multiple-choice questions regarding events, persons, or places that were prominent in the news during the four decades 1950 to 1989. With increasing age, performances of a public event test declined equivalently each decade. The effect of both age and decade was significant by three-way analysis of variance. The interaction term (age x decade) was not significant, which indicates that performance on questions relating to each decade was affected about equally by age. Performance on this test was clearly age-dependent across the time period sampled. Considering the results obtained in this study, we could conclude that aging influences very old memories as well as recent memories.
Fukatsu
R
R
Department of Neurology, Miyagi National Hospital.
Fujii
T
T
Sato
M
M
Kimura
I
I
Saso
S
S
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008875:Middle Aged