When Does Prior Knowledge Disproportionately Benefit Older Adults' Memory?

Overview

Journal Neuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn

Date 2015 Oct 17

PMID 26473767

Citations 14

Authors

Stephen P Badham

Mhairi Hay

Natasha Foxon

Kiran Kaur

Elizabeth A Maylor

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

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).

Citing Articles

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Age Deficits in Associative Memory Are Not Alleviated by Multisensory Paradigms.

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The retrogenesis of age-related decline in declarative and procedural memory.

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A Double-Edged Sword: The Role of Prior Knowledge in Memory Aging.

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