Abstract: The purpose of this study was to explore the age differences of young adults and the elderly on the effects of the divided attention of memory task.The divided attention performance was remembering directed memory andlogical story while making judgement of simple arithmatic items simultane-ously. The results indicated that: (1) under the above situations, the oldergroup's performances were more penalized than that of their younger coun-terparts, age differences of memory were amplified by the divided attentioncondition; (2) the relative divided attention costs (DA costs) were signific-antly affected by the stimulus conditions: the segmental score of story belong-ing to the episodic memory got the biggest DA cost, the meaningful scoreof story similar to the semantic memory got the least DA cost, and directedmemory, in the midst of them, got the middle DA cost; (3) the effects ofdivided attention on memory had adaptive phenomena, the effect during thesecond time was smaller than that of the first time

Key words: Divided attention, Relative divided attention cost, Age differences, Memory