Fidelity of visual long-term memory in the ageing process

Several studies indicate that the capacity for retaining visual content in long-term memory (LTM) is almost unlimited and vastly superior to the storage capacity for verbal data. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the fidelity of visual memory in adults and older adults and compare it with that of young adults. A Visual Long-Term Memory Test (VLT-MT) was developed in which the participants viewed 512 images, divided into two groups of 256 figures, and performed a subsequent forced-choice task after viewing each group. The results also indicate that the semantic category to which the stimulus belonged influenced the performance of the subjects, and that the capacity to recognize a given object diminished as the number of figures from the same category increased.