THE inevitable memory loss that comes with age is more like a long, slippery
slide than falling off a cliff, according to a psychologist at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has found that our performance in a wide variety of
memory tasks deteriorates steadily from our mid-20s.
Denise Park selected 350 volunteers, ranging from 20-somethings to
octogenarians. They sat 11 tests on visual, spatial, verbal, and other types of
memory. She found that performance in all the tests decreased steadily with
age—the decline in performance between the 70s and 80s age groups, for
example, was the…
