Abstract
Differences in difficulty judgments of various memory tasks and estimates of memory performance were investigated between young and elderly people. A questionnaire consisting of 20 types of memory tasks that combined five conditions of stimulus presentation times (2 sec, 4 sec, 8 sec, unlimited) and five conditions of stimulus items (8, 16, 24, 32, 40) were given to participants and judgments regarding the difficulty of each memory task and estimates of memory performance were inquired. When the stimulus presentation time got longer, young people evaluated the difficulty of memory tasks as being less, whereas elderly people’s judgments of difficulty did not change, indicating that the cognition of the relationship between stimulus presentation time (learning time) and the degree of difficulty of memory tasks was different between the young and the elderly. Changes in presentation time did not affect judgments of difficulty regarding memory tasks in elderly people.
