My comments focus on three broad issues that enter prominently into much of the content of the chapters in this section: the conceptualization of aging's effects on memory proficiency, the generalizability of laboratory memory performances to everyday memory performances, and the concept of expertise and its implications for aging's effects on everyday memory performances.

Aging's effects on memory proficiency

General-decrement principle

The nature of research on adult age differences in everyday memory performances is likely to be influenced greatly by one's conceptualization of aging's effects on memory proficiency. The conceptualization that has dominated laboratory research on adult age differences in memory proficiency may best be described in terms of a general-decrement principle. The carryover of this principle to research on everyday memory performances has obvious important implications. It surely will preclude attempts by investigators to discover components of everyday memory that are immune to age-related decrements in proficiency or to explore means of alleviating or reducing age-related decrements for those components that are age-sensitive.

According to this principle, irreversible decrements in memory proficiency are inevitable consequences of the organism's biological degeneration from early to late adulthood, resulting either in a decrease in cognitive resources (Hasher & Zacks, 1979) or in a “slowing down” of cognitive processes (Salthouse, 1980) during old age. Much of the emphasis in contemporary aging-memory research is on testing the validities of these theoretical accounts of why memory proficiency declines with aging.