No Inhibitory Deficit in Older Adults' Episodic Memory
- 1 January 2007
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Psychological Science
- Vol. 18 (1), 72-78
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01851.x
Abstract
Selectively retrieving a subset of previously studied material can cause forgetting of the unpracticed material. Such retrieval-induced forgetting is attributed to an inhibitory mechanism recruited to resolve interference among competing items. According to the inhibition-deficit hypothesis, older people experience a specific decline in inhibitory function and thus should show reduced retrieval-induced forgetting. However, the results of the two experiments reported here show the same amount of retrieval-induced forgetting in younger and older adults. These results indicate that retrieval inhibition is intact in older adults' episodic recall. The findings suggest that the common view of a general inhibitory deficit in older adults needs to be updated and that older adults show intact inhibition in some cognitive tasks and deficient inhibition in others.Keywords
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