Adult age differences in reading and remembering text and using this information to make decisions in everyday life

The older reader can be characterized as having many advantages and some disadvantages in comparison to the younger reader. Often in aging research we focus on the “problems�? faced by older adults without recognizing their many achievements. This chapter attempts to put both positives and negatives of the aging reader into perspective. Although we lay the foundation of discussion on a bed of relevant processing declines, it w ill become obvious to the reader that despite these setbacks older adults are brilliantly resilient and ever growing in their acquisition and use of information gathered from text.