Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

that memory declines with old age. However, this decline seems to be differential, affecting only some memory func-tions. Episodic memory seems to be especially vulnerable to the effects of age (see, e.g., Light, 1991). Researchers have tried to explain the mechanisms underlying the age-related decline in episodic memory, and several hypotheses have been advanced to explain the relatively poor memory performance of the old (see Light, 1991, for a review). Recently, a binding deficit hypothesis has been sug-gested. Chalfonte and Johnson (1996) and Mitchell, John-son, Raye, Mather, and D’Esposito (2000) showed that older adults are particularly deficient in memory that re-quires the binding of information to contextual elements. Naveh-Benjamin (2000) proposed an associative deficit hypothesis (ADH) which focuses on the distinction be