According to an American study published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics (Attention, Perception and Psychophysics), the ability to remember in color fades with age. You could say, based on this, that our memories begin to resemble those sepia-colored photos that many of the family albums usually start.
A team of American scientists has reached this conclusion after conducting an experiment in which they measured the precision of the participants in remembering the color of a series of points.
In this research, the performance of two different age groups was compared; one made up of 11 people with an average age of 67 years and the other made up of 13 23-year-olds.
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Each participant was presented, on a computer screen, with two, three or four colored dots. These points then disappeared and, after a few seconds, a new point would reappear on the screen (which could be the same color as the previous points or a different color). The participants, in this phase of the study, had to say whether the color of that new point had been seen in previous ones or not.
The result of the experiment was that the group of young people showed fewer failures when remembering the coincidences.
"The study shows that younger people save their memories in 'high definition', a skill that decreases with age "says Philip Ko, a researcher at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Brain scans that were performed during the test found that age did not affect when information was stored when the points were presented. The older group was able to store memories the same as the younger group; but nevertheless, they weren't able to retrieve them in the same way.
What does this mean? Researchers believe that younger adults are able to use a different type of visual memory: "Implicit perceptual memory". This implicit memory is what would be helping in the retrieval of information and, according to the researchers, with age we are losing the ability to use it.
"Although we still do not know why older adults perform worse (since their neuronal activity shows that their memory capacity is intact), we have two clues that could help us provide an explanation"says Dr. Ko.
“First of all, and based on the detailed analysis of this experiment and previous studies carried out in our laboratory, we know that older adults retrieve information differently than younger adults".
«Second, studies carried out by other laboratories suggest that the quality of memories of older adults is poorer than that of younger adults".
"In other words, while older adults can store the same number of items, the memory of each item is more diffuse than that of younger adults."
Apparently, with age we will remember moments of our past with little intense colors ... but that does not mean that they were not the most "colorful". Source
Since we are talking about older people, I leave you with [a video from the Networks program entitled "Instead of diseases, take care of health":