AP PSYCHOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Relative to younger adults, older adults tend to perform more poorly on tests of both free recall and item recognition memory. The age difference in performance is typically larger for recall tasks relative to those involving recognition.

Detailed explanation-2: -In the present laboratory-based tasks, older adults at best performed no worse than younger adults. When a naturalistic prospective memory task is used, however, older adults were found to significantly outperform younger adults (Henry et al., 2004; Rendell & Thomson, 1999).

Detailed explanation-3: -Developmental studies have revealed that recognition memory performance increases with age, and it appears that this increase is due primarily to recollection (i.e., remember responses), in the absence of age differences due to familiarity. This pattern of results was reported by Billingsley et al.

Detailed explanation-4: -Older adults tend to learn more slowly and perform less well on tasks involving imagination and memorization than do younger adults, but what older adults may be lacking in terms of specific mental tasks, they make up for in wisdom, or expert and practical knowledge based on life experience.

Detailed explanation-5: -Several analyses of the resulting data converge on the conclusion that there is a consistent age-related decrement in recall that is disproportionately greater than the age-related decrement in recognition.