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. 2016;23(3):338-65.
doi: 10.1080/13825585.2015.1099607. Epub 2015 Oct 16.

When does prior knowledge disproportionately benefit older adults' memory?

Stephen P Badham  1 , Mhairi Hay  1 , Natasha Foxon  1 , Kiran Kaur  1 , Elizabeth A Maylor  1
Affiliations

When does prior knowledge disproportionately benefit older adults' memory?

Stephen P Badham et al. Neuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn. 2016.

Abstract

Material consistent with knowledge/experience is generally more memorable than material inconsistent with knowledge/experience - an effect that can be more extreme in older adults. Four experiments investigated knowledge effects on memory with young and older adults. Memory for familiar and unfamiliar proverbs (Experiment 1) and for common and uncommon scenes (Experiment 2) showed similar knowledge effects across age groups. Memory for person-consistent and person-neutral actions (Experiment 3) showed a greater benefit of prior knowledge in older adults. For cued recall of related and unrelated word pairs (Experiment 4), older adults benefited more from prior knowledge only when it provided uniquely useful additional information beyond the episodic association itself. The current data and literature suggest that prior knowledge has the age-dissociable mnemonic properties of (1) improving memory for the episodes themselves (age invariant), and (2) providing conceptual information about the tasks/stimuli extrinsically to the actual episodic memory (particularly aiding older adults).

Keywords: Aging; cued recall; free recall; memory; prior knowledge; recognition.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Proportion of proverbs recalled by young and older adults for known (English) and unknown (Asian) proverbs in Experiment 1. Error bars are ±1 SE.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Recognition memory performance (hits minus false alarms) for young and older adults, high and low knowledge consistency stimuli, and high and low encoding specificity recognition trials in Experiment 2. Error bars are ±1 SE.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Mean recognition performance (hits minus false alarms) for stimuli consistent or neutral with respect to prior knowledge in Experiment 3. Error bars are ±1 SE.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Mean proportion correct for cued recall of word pairs with unique, shared, or no relations. Error bars are ±1 SE.
Figure A1.
Figure A1.
Mean recognition performance (hits minus false alarms) across five test runs for young and older adults, knowledge-consistent and knowledge-neutral stimuli, and 1–1 and 1–3 fan levels in Experiment 3.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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