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Contrary to popular belief, not everyone over the age of 65 suffers from a decline in the ability to remember complex information. Even those who do so can overcome the problem by learning new ways of storing information.

In a study that compared the performance of older and younger people on memory performance tests, researchers from the University of Arizona found that most of the problems older people have are contextual, or source, memory, which stem from impairments in the frontal lobes of the brain that occur as they age.

Source memory differs from item memory in that it requires people to remember, for example, not just that something happened, but when and where it happened and how they acquired knowledge of it.

All participants were first evaluated for impairments in the frontal lobes. Elderly subjects in the group who demonstrated above average performance on those tests were able to perform the memory performance tests as well as the younger people tested. Elderly individuals with below average frontal lobe scores tended, on average, to perform more poorly.

The Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition (2001;27, 1131-1146) revealed that, however, when the researchers required participants to consider the relation between an item and its context, age difference in memory performance was not evident.