IF A 50 YR OLD AND A 25 YR OLD WERE TOLD TO RECALL A LIST OF WORDS, WHAT DIFFERENCE IN BRAIN ACTIVITY WOULD EXPECT?

Answer 1

All other things being equal, the accuracy of recall would be about the same, but it would depend greatly on what the words were. With healthy individuals and equal familiarity of the words, I would not expect any significant brain differences.

However, I am not a neurologist. Since this is not my area of expertise, I searched Google under the key words "brain memory words age" to get these possible sources:

http://www.psychologymatters.org/memchanges.html
http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/seniors/common-older/124.html
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/121/5/861
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=partial-recall-why-memory-fades
http://www.newhorizons.org/neuro/markus.htm

There are more sites available. In the future, you can find the information you desire more quickly, if you use appropriate key words to do your own search. Also see http://hanlib.sou.edu/searchtools/.

I hope this helps. Thanks for asking.