Research Article No Inhibitory Deficit in Older Adults ’ Episodic Memory

ABSTRACT—Selectively retrieving a subset of previously studied material can cause forgetting of the unpracticed material. Such retrieval-induced forgetting is attributed to an inhibitory mechanism recruited to resolve interference among competing items. According to the inhibition-deficit hypothesis, older people experience a specific decline in inhibitory function and thus should show reduced re-trieval-induced forgetting. However, the results of the two experiments reported here show the same amount of re-trieval-induced forgetting in younger and older adults. These results indicate that retrieval inhibition is intact in older adults ’ episodic recall. The findings suggest that the common view of a general inhibitory deficit in older adults needs to be updated and that older adults show intact in-hibition in some cognitive tasks and deficient inhibition in others. Observations from both daily life and experimental situations indicate that as adults age, they experience more cognitive failures. Older people may perseverate on already-produced passages during discourse, may show increased rates of irrele-vant intrusions, and may have trouble selectively attending to some information while ignoring other information (e.g., Hasher