Memory in Middle‐aged Adults

In this article we review the literature on memory in middle‐aged adults, focusing on the place of memory in development from young adulthood through old age. We examine the areas of free recall, cued recall, recognition, and prose recall as well as the issues of automaticity and strategy use. The overall findings reveal a steady decline in memory performance; some areas, such as recognition and prose recall, show less decline than others. Task variables that affect the middle‐aged adult's performance in laboratory tasks are noted, and some pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed. This review was supported by a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences of Florida International University to Gordon E. Finley.