Abstract

Increased difficulty with memory for recent events is a well-documented consequence of normal aging, but not all aspects of memory are equally affected. To compare the impact of aging on short-term recognition and temporal order memory, young and older adults were asked to identify the serial position that a probe item had occupied in a study set, or to judge that the probe was novel (had not been in the study set). Stimuli were compound sinusoidal gratings, which resist verbal description and rehearsal. With retention intervals of 1 or 4 seconds, young and older adults produced highly similar overall performance, serial position curves, and proportions of trials on which a correct recognition response was accompanied by an incorrect temporal order judgment. Temporal order errors, which occurred on about one quarter of trials, were traced to two factors: perceptual similarity between the wrongly identified study item and the correct item, and temporal similarity between the wrongly identified item and the correct one. Our results show that short-term visual temporal order memory is well-preserved in normal aging, and when temporal order errors do occur, they arise from similar causes for young and older people.