Psychology Commons^™

Ability To Recall Specific Detail And General Detail (Gist) In Young Old, Middle Old, And Older Adults, Victoria Alexander, Mark Bahr, Richard Hicks

Mark Bahr

Declining cognition has been associated with detrimental consequences such as decline in independence and reduced quality of life. If we can understand the nature of the decline, we may be able to reduce the detrimental consequences. It seems that with increasing age we remember the general detail of the stimuli, rather than the specific details. Recall of general information but failure to identify the specific instances previously known or studied is termed gist error, and this is seen to be indicative of age related change in memory. Previous studies have compared younger vs older age groups; meaning that the time …