Aging and working memory in gesture imitation

The performance of older and younger adults was compared in concurrent and delayed gestural imitation tasks. Although the older adults were less accurate than the young on all measures and also took longer to inspect the modelled gesture before imitation, the recall delay did not differentially affect their performance. One explanation is that by taking more time to process task components, the older adults were effectively able to improve the functional storage capacity of working memory to match that of the younger adults.