How physicians appraise everyday memory failures of patients across the adult life span.

A person-perception paradigm was used to investigate how primary care physicians appraise young, middle-aged, young-old, or old-old hypothetical patients (targets) who experience incidences of everyday memory failure. The physicians distinguished among targets who experienced short-, long-, and very long-term types of failure. However, their ratings of the point at which they would recommend intervention and of the referrals they would make in response to the three types of failure were not affected by the age of the target. The physicians' responses are compared with prior research results obtained for lay subjects' appraisals of young versus older targets' memory failures. The implications for primary care physicians' views of the significance of everyday memory failures in older adults are discussed.