Abstract

The present study was attempted to find out age-related difference in memory awareness of adulthood. Memory awareness is a subjective experience conscious of one's memory system and memory process in specific situation. Previous researches has produced conflicting conclusions about memory awareness in adulthood. Thus, this study was conducted to clarity reasons why it is inconsistent with the previous studies, and to find out the age differences and characteristics in memory monitoring. 40 young men and 40 elderly men were asked to predict the amount of one's performance prior to or after completing each task. The main dependent variable was estimation inaccuracy for performance. Therefore, it has been analysed that how the prediction for memory performance varies with age, tasks and time of estimation. The results reveals that monitoring inaccuracy was found to both age groups commonly, and influenced by task types and time of estimation. And it also shows that older subjects were more accurate than younger subjects in performance estimations to everyday tasks rather than laboratory tasks. This results means that memory monitoring ability of older adults not deficit on tasks with which they were more familiar. Also, it was found that alder adults have a tendency to overestimate performance, whereas younger adults tend to underestimate as to their performance. However, the tendency of overestimation in older adults was high in prediction, but it was remarkably law in postdiction. Such a result means that their overestimation was derived from inadequate evaluation on tasks rather than from overconfidence for their own ability. The overall results of this research indicated that older adults relatively have accuracy for monitoring of information state in their memory if the tasks are familiar or after having experienced the tasks. In further studies, analysis making use of more diverse measures is to be conducted to reveal mechanism underlying relationship between memory monitoring and memory.