Memory changes in older people

This chapter discusses briefly how autobiographical events are stored in memory, and considers how changes that come with increasing age may affect storage and access to such events in memory. Studying autobiographical memory, or &s;personal memory&s; is comparatively easy because we are getting people to talk about themselves, which most people do happily and without feeling threatened, as they may do by a more formal memory test. Most of the studies of the effect of illness on memory and cognitive function have been done with older people. Changes in the nature, as well as increases in the number of working memory errors are generally found in old age. Stine and Wingfield remark that the effects of age-related changes in working memory capacity are sometimes disguised because older people may increasingly rely on redundant information, for example in recall from information they have read or heard, or in autobiographical recall.