The hypothesis that memory depends in part on de novo brain protein synthesis has stimulated hundreds of experimental studies during the past 20 years involving drugs that reversibly inhibit brain protein synthesis. This article reviews those studies. It summarizes the basic findings, considers what stage of memory storage or retrieval is disrupted by the drugs, and reviews the side effects that these drugs have, including their effects on brain catecholamine metabolism. It is concluded that the available data make a compelling and internally consistent case for the hypothesis that protein synthesis, during or shortly after training, is an essential step in the formation of long-term memory.

Older adults process emotional information differently than younger adults and may demonstrate less of a negativity bias on cognitive tasks. The Iowa Gambling Task designed by A. Bechara, H. Damasio, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio (1997) has been used to examine the integration of emotion and cognition in a risky-choice decision task and may give insight into differences in the decision-making strategies in younger and older adults. Eighty-eight younger adults (18-34 years) and 67 older adults (65-88 years) completed the Iowa Gambling Task. Using a theoretical decomposition of the task designed by J. R. Busemeyer and J. C. Stout (2002), the authors found that both groups were successful at solving the task but used very different strategies that reflected each group's strength. For younger adults, that strength was learning and memory. For older adults, that strength was an accurate representation of wins and losses (valence).

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The effects of age on implicit memory were assessed in elderly and young adults using 2 priming procedures. Subjects also completed the WAIS-R, 3 tests to assess frontal lobe function, and 2 recall and 2 recognition tests of explicit memory. In Experiment 1, subjects were exposed to the low-frequency member of a homophone pair in a test purported to assess general knowledge. Subsequently, subjects completed a spelling test that contained the previously presented homophones to assess priming. Young subjects demonstrated priming (p < .01). Elderly subjects demonstrated a high baseline that may have obscured priming. In Experiment 2, subjects from each decade of life from the 20s through the 80s were given a word-stem completion test of priming. All age conditions demonstrated an effect of priming (p < .01). However, subjects in their 70s and 80s demonstrated lower priming scores (p < .05). Elderly subjects were also impaired on immediate-and delayed-recall tests. These results suggest an age-related decline in both implicit and explicit memory.Many studies of memory in the elderly have concentrated on stages of memory or processing of information. The elderly are generally not impaired, or only slightly impaired, on tests of sensory memory, short-term memory, or remote memory compared with young subjects (see Poon, 1985, for review). However, long-term memory is usually found to be impaired when the elderly are given recall or recognition tests for materials such as word lists (Bruning, Holzbauer, & Kimberlin, 1975), passages of prose (Gordon & Clark. 1974), pictures (Smith & Winograd, 1978, or geometric figures (Riege & Inman, 1981). Explanations for this impairment have frequently been framed in terms of information-processing deficits such as encoding, storage, or retrieval and more recently in terms of a decline in the capacity for cognitive processing or a decrease in semantic elaboration (Craik, 1985;Poon, 1985;Salthouse, 1985Salthouse, , 1988.Recently, several studies of memory and aging have reported testing procedures that examined the theoretical distinction between the type of information stored and how this stored information is affected by aging (