Does Aging Affect Recall More Than Recognition Memory?

Although it is generally agreed that recall performance declines more than recognition memory performance in the course of normal aging, there are some dissenting voices. There are also a few empirical findings that cast doubt on that conclusion. In light of these ambiguities the present experiments were designed to answer the question in a more definitive fashion. Over a series of 3 experiments, groups of younger and older adults performed recall and recognition tests successively on the same lists of words. 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. This conclusion is in line with several theoretical accounts of age-related differences in cognitive processing and also with emerging evidence from cognitive neuroscience.