Susan Brink surveys research that investigated the question, “Who has the better memory: the young person who knows a little and remembers all of it, or the older person who has learned a lot and forgets a little of it?”
It could be that older, wiser heads are so chock full of knowledge that it simply takes longer to retrieve the right bits. …
[Researcher Michael] Ramscar created computer models simulating young brains and older brains. He fed information into both models but added buckets more information to the model meant to simulate an older brain. “I could see precious little evidence of decline in [the models of] healthy, older people,” he says. “Their slowness and slight forgetfulness were exactly what I’d expect” because with more to draw on, there are more places to search, and there’s more information to search through to find an answer.
Benedict Carey digs in (NYT):
[T]he new study is not likely to overturn 100 years of research, cognitive scientists say.
Neuroscientists have some reason to believe that neural processing speed, like many reflexes, slows over the years; anatomical studies suggest that the brain also undergoes subtle structural changes that could affect memory. Still, the new report will very likely add to a growing skepticism about how steep age-related decline really is.
It goes without saying that many people remain disarmingly razor-witted well into their 90s; yet doubts about the average extent of the decline are rooted not in individual differences but in study methodology. Many studies comparing older and younger people, for instance, did not take into account the effects of pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease, said Laura Carstensen, a psychologist at Stanford University.
Thomas Hills weighs in:
Years of research have shown that older people have larger vocabularies than younger people, other things being equal. In their paper, Ramscar and associates show that even this we’ve probably underestimated, because older people tend to know a lot of very low frequency words such as “zaftig” and “arroyo” and “byzantine”, words that are difficult to test because there are so many of them. Younger people tend to know fewer of these words.
The Dish 