Mental Aspects of Ageing 41 



and the time when it was learnt. We are still some way 

 from being able to measure effective memory; it cannot be 

 taken for granted that "digit span", "sentence repetition", 

 "retention of Turkish-Enghsh vocabulary" and other such 

 tests, or the recognition of pictures, give a fair estimate 

 of anyone's capacity to retain and reproduce what he has 

 perceived, or tried to learn. Moreover performance on most 

 memory tests is influenced by intelligence and habit patterns: 

 a comparison of an elderly group with a youthful group 

 can therefore be fallacious. Such groups have usually been 

 matched on vocabulary score or socio-economic status, 

 neither of which is a wholly safe criterion. Even so the more 

 intelligent of the elderly subjects do much better than the 

 rest, and those who have least need to organize their habits 

 in order to learn an intellectual or a motor task show least 

 deficit. The learning process, from initial perception to final 

 performance, is now being examined with such energy, in 

 relation to a complex theory, that retention in the human 

 subject at different ages will perhaps soon be elucidated, but 

 for the present we cannot dissect the disability that the old 

 have in learning unfamiliar tasks. Possibly this is to make a 

 necessity out of a virtue. Sir Frederic Bartlett wrote not so 

 long ago that it is insufficient to collect, analyse and study 

 measures of simple bodily or mental functions carried out in 

 artificial isolation from all others; what is needed is to collect, 

 analyse and study measures of skill. This of course is what 

 has been done by Welford and his colleagues at Cambridge. 

 As Sir Frederic will be speaking later on about this, and 

 about remembering, I would only say now that the Cambridge 

 experiments have demonstrated the trouble which the elderly 

 have in organising new incoming data and perhaps also out- 

 going action. Whether this accounts in part for the greater 

 slowness of the aged in performing many intellectual and 

 motor operations, and for their relative or total failure in 

 speeded tasks, is still doubtful. Compensatory tendencies 

 may enable a good level of achievement to be maintained in 

 spite of impaired capabilities, so long as the method and 



