Memory Functioning in Late Adulthood

Abstract

This chapter is primarily about people rather than about research findings. I chose a humanistic rather than a rigorous scientific approach to the memory functioning of older people for three reasons. The first is my reaction to two new scholarly books on human memory. Although both authors dealt adequately with representative samples of theoretical and research literature, neither paid the slightest attention to the individuals in whom the processes presumably occur; indeed, the authors conveyed the impression that efficiency of processing material from stimulus input with losses along the way to response output is more dependent on factors such as temporal sequencing and experimenter instructions than on the characteristics of the individuals through and presumably by whom the material is processed. Perhaps because of justified emphasis on scientific rigor, scientists may have inadvertently relegated the person, without whom there could be no memory, to secondary or even tertiary importance.