Developing the questionnaire of subjective everyday memory and cognition for the Japanese elderly.

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Generally memory performance declines as one gets older. Tip of tongue is one of the most well known phenomenon for elderly. Everyday slips or lapses have been thoroughly examined. However, rare studies have been conducted to examine how older people feel about their daily memory and cognitive activities. For this reason, we developed a self-report questionnaire in order to measure which field of everyday memory and cognitive functions the elderly feel inferior to the young.After we conducted a pre-test twice, we newly selected 36 questionnaire items about daily memory and cognitive performance for the elderly. Note that most of items were closely related to hot issues of cognitive psychology today (e.g., working memory, and prospective memory). We then conducted in-home interview Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. A final number used for an analysis was 2332, and this rate was 66%.We again conducted in-home interview with 1550 elders residing in the rural area. A final number used for an analysis was 1134, and the rate was 73%. We conducted a factor analysis, extracted eight factors, and labeled these factors as 'Use of advanced informational tool,' 'Facial recognition,' 'Forgetting,' 'Storage and encoding,' 'Autobiographical memory,' 'Environmental cognition,' 'Use of memory aid,' and 'Prospective memory' respectively.The most interesting result was that these eight factors seem to be very similar to the factors that we have already found in Tokyo. This result suggests that those, which were deeply related to the every memory and cognition, were supposed to be quite stable.