Model-Based Characterization of Forgetting in Children and Across The Lifespan

To fully understand human memory, it is necessary tounderstand its lifespan development. However, memoryassessments often rely on significantly differentmethodologies for different age groups, and their resultsare typically not directly comparable. In this paper, wepresent a quantitative assessment of memory functionspanning an age range of five to 85 years that is based on amodel-based memory assessment. This approach yields auniform metric that is directly interpretable and can becompared across different tasks and materials that areappropriate for different age groups. The results show arobust U-shape function, with long-term memory functionat age 5 being comparable to that of cognitively impairedelderly individuals. These results and the method utilizedcould provide a new foundation for future studies onmemory development across life stages.