[Recall of personal performance in the elderly].

One shortcoming of traditional memory research with older adults is that the scope of memory tasks and memory materials used has been rather narrow. The studies to be presented in this paper, assessing memory for self-performed action events, were designed to answer the question whether the well-documented age-related memory decline indicates a global characteristic of the aging memory system or if this decline is specific to the verbal memory system. It could be demonstrated that memory deficits older adults show when learning and remembering self-performed action events are similar to those that have been found many times for verbal materials. Thus, the age effect in memory is not limited to verbal materials.