Differential age-related change of prose memory in older Hong Kong Chinese of higher and lower education

Abstract

Background. Memory difficulty is one of the most common complaints of older people, with or without psychiatric conditions. It is therefore of utmost important to understand how normal ageing process impacts upon prose memory so as to gain insight into ways to differentiate pathological vs normal age-related changes of the recall of prose observed among older people. Objectives. To understand the differential age-related change of prose memory in older Hong Kong Chinese of higher and lower education. Method. Forty-eight normal, healthy Cantonese-speaking Chinese were recruited. Seventeen of them were younger, highly educated participants. Among the 31 older people recruited, 19 of them received education comparable with the younger participants and 12 were older people of low education. A prose passage was constructed to measure the different processes of prose memory, including learning efficiency, rate of forgetting, recall accuracy, accuracy of temporal sequence of information recalled, distortions, and recognition memory. Results. As expected, ageing affected all the processes of prose memory measured, except the rate of forgetting. Apart from learning efficiency and rate of forgetting, education was observed to modify the effect of ageing on all the processes studied. Conclusions. Changes of prose memory associated with ageing and the differential effect of education on prose recall among older people were discussed. The findings seem to suggest that prose memory is a multifaceted construct. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.