The Relationship of Age and Retention-Interval Activity in Short-Term Memory

Memory impairment in the aged: Storage versus retrieval deficit.

“…A t test comparing mean digit span scores of young and aged 5s yielded t (46) = 1.96, ns. This is consistent with other experimental studies which report no significant age-related differences in immediate memory span (Bromley, 1958;Drachman & Hughes, 1971;Kriauciunas, 1968).…”

Short‐term Memory and Age

“…However, when the subjects were allowed to repeat the cue number before subtracting, men under 40 did better than those above that age. Somewhat similar results were observed by Kriauciunas (21). With normal subjects in the age range of 25 to 65 years, no age differences appeared in a trigram‐recall task with retention periods of six, twelve, and eighteen seconds, the interpolated task consisting of reading serial numbers, or random numbers, or random letters.…”

“…Bromley (18) found age differences only for the digits‐backward score, and not for the combined score. Also no significant age differences were found for the digits‐forward task (20, 21), or the word span (22). Although not having an age variable, Inglis (23) provided data showing that the digits‐forward task did not even differentiate between elderly patients with gross memory disorder and those without.…”

Working memory deficits associated with chronic fatigue syndrome

“…This indicates that the locus of CFS deficits is not in decreased storage capacity. This is not surprising in that (storage) capacity aspects of WM seem to be spared in normal aging (Dobbs & Rule, 1989) and are only marginally affected by various pathologies (Bromley, 1958;Caird, 1966;Inglis & Caird, 1963;Kriauciunas, 1968). For example, longitudinal studies have found forward digit span to be unimpaired in patients with mild-to-moderate dementia of the Alzheimer's type (Botwinick et al, 1986), unimpaired or only mildly decreased in patients with Korsakoff's syndrome (Kopelman, 1985), and normal forward digit span performance has been reported in patients with frontal lobe damage (Lezak, 1979;Teuber, 1964).…”