Healthy older adults tend to crowd their brain with too many memories that consequently interfere with what they are trying to remember or do, according to a report in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science.

What to know:

• While older and younger adults’ memories contain similar target features, the older adults’ memories contain more nontarget features and, thus, are cluttered with excessive information.

• In older adults, an ongoing situation cues prior memories and can interfere with the retrieval of target information as well as other memory-dependent cognitive functions.

• Earlier memories seem to carry more importance when it comes to decision-making in older adults.

• Healthy older adults have more knowledge than their younger counterparts, but they tend to form associations with older, often irrelevant memories in something scientists refer to as “reduced cognitive control.”

• Although memory response times may be slowed by the clutter, evidence suggests that older adults show preserved, and at times enhanced, creativity in problem-solving as a function of enriched memories.

This is a summary of the article “Cluttered memory representations shape cognition in old age,” published by Trends in Cognitive Sciences on February 11. The full article can be found on cell.com.

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