Episodic memory than older adults have both for real

episodic memory than older adults have, both for real and imagined events
( Despres & others, 2017 ; Sandrini & others, 2016 ; Wang & Cabeza, 2017 ). A
recent study found that episodic memory performance predicted which
individuals would develop dementia 10 years prior to the clinical diagnosis
of the disease ( Boraxbekk & others, 2015 ).
Autobiographical memories are stored as episodic memories. A robust
finding in autobiographical memory is called the reminiscence bump, in
which adults remember more events from the second and third decades of
their lives than from other decades ( Berntsen & Rubin, 2002 ; Rathbone,
O’Connor, & Moulin, 2017 ; Steiner & others, 2014 ). The “bump” is found
more for positive than negative life events. One study revealed support for
the reminiscence bump and indicated that these memories were more
distinct and more important for identity development ( Demiray, Gulgoz, &
Bluck, 2009 ).
Semantic memory is a person’s knowledge about the world. It includes a
person’s fields of expertise (such as knowledge of chess, for a skilled chess
player); general academic knowledge of the sort learned in school (such as
knowledge of geometry); and “everyday knowledge” about meanings of
words, famous individuals, important places, and common things (such as
who Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi are). For the most part, episodic
memory declines more than semantic memory in older adults ( Kuo & others,
2014 ; Lustig & Lin, 2016 ).
Although older adults often take longer to retrieve semantic information,
usually they can ultimately retrieve it. As shown in Figure 12 , semantic
memory continues to increase through the fifties, showing little decline

even through the sixties ( Ronnlund & others, 2005 ). Figure 12 also shows
how the gap between semantic and episodic memory widens during middle
and late adulthood. In one study, after almost five decades adults identified
pictures of their high school classmates with better than 70 percent
accuracy ( Bahrick, Bahrick, & Wittlinger, 1975 ). How well do most adults
remember the actual subjects they learned in high school, however? In
the Connecting with Research interlude, we focus on another study that
examined the developmental aspects of semantic memory.
FIGURE 12 CHANGES
IN EPISODIC AND SEMANTIC MEMORY IN ADULTHOOD
connecting with research
HOW WELL DO ADULTS REMEMBER WHAT THEY LEARNED IN HIGH
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE SPANISH?
When older adults are assessed for what they learned in high school or
college, researchers find neither great durability in memory nor huge
deterioration (Salthouse, 1991 ). In one study, non-Latino adults of various
ages in the United States were studied to determine how much Spanish they
remembered from classes they had taken in high school or college (Bahrick,
1984 ). The individuals chosen for the study had used Spanish very little since
they initially learned it in high school or college. Not surprisingly, young
adults who had taken Spanish classes within the last three years
remembered their Spanish best. After that, the deterioration in memory was
very gradual (see Figure 13 ). For example, older adults who had studied