The Adaptive and Strategic Use of Memory By Older Adults: Evaluative Processing and Value-Directed Remembering

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on how older adults use evaluative processing to guide encoding and retrieval operations, and how older adults then use value to make decisions about what information is important to remember. Research in cognitive aging can tell a great deal about memory impairments. This chapter illustrates that, older adults may feel the need to focus on the important things to remember, given a long life span of encountering information, and the knowledge that life, as well as memory resources, is limited. Moreover, a functional approach to how older adults direct resources to certain kinds and types of information, in relation to value, and strategic and selective control theory, likely be a fruitful manner to study age-related change across the life span in order to understand the impairments, biases and benefits that accompany memory performance in old age. Finally, older adults’ bias to focus on processing high-value information coupled with prior knowledge to supplement memory, or remembering important positive information at the expense of other details, can lead to the efficient and effective use of memory during the adult life span.