Verbatim memories are also subjected to faster decay caused by the abundance of information contained within the memory and thus, a large amount of cognitive resources consumed during both encoding and retrieval of the memory.
12.
Direct access to verbatim memory traces tends to decline with old age but, generally, gist memory and reconstructive processes accommodate for the loss so that, in adulthood, memory recall doesn t decrease as much.
13.
In contrast, patients with Alzheimer s disease experience interference in the reconstruction aspect of memory link to the gist traces and so memory recall is drastically reduced and can only rely on verbatim memories which tend have limited storage for about 4 words in memory.
14.
Evidence of these developmental shifts in verbatim memory comes directly from studies using nonsense words, where it has been shown that older children are more adept at distinguishing between presented nonsense words and their distractors than the younger children in the sample ( ability increases with age from age 7-11 ).
15.
For example, if given a list of words to memorize verbatim memory would create a separate store for each of these words and would also encode associations with the word itself ( a picture that came to mind when the word " apple " was read off the list, or maybe a thought regarding the delicious apple the person ate for lunch prior to memorizing the word list ) and associations within the environment ( the room in which they were sitting was very warm and it was cooler in the room where they ate their apple earlier in the day ).
