Abstract
General knowledge questions are used across a variety of research and clinical settings to measure cognitive processes such as metacognition, knowledge acquisition, retrieval processes, and intelligence. Existing norms only report performance in younger adults, rendering them of limited utility for cognitive aging research because of well-documented differences in semantic memory and knowledge as a function of age. Specifically, older adults typically outperform younger adults in tasks assessing retrieval of information from the knowledge base. Here we present older adult performance on 421 general knowledge questions across a range of difficulty levels. Cued recall data, including data on the phenomenology of retrieval failures, and multiple-choice data are available. These norms will allow researchers to identify questions that are not likely to be known by older adult participants to examine learning or acquisition processes, or to select questions within a range of marginal accessibility, for example. Comparisons with young adult data from prior databases confirms previous findings of greater knowledge in older adults and indicates there is preservation of knowledge from early adulthood into older adulthood.
Highlights
General knowledge questions are used across a variety of research and clinical settings to measure cognitive processes such as metacognition, knowledge acquisition, retrieval processes, and intelligence
Responses were scored as correct if the participant provided the correct answer or a clear misspelling or minor morphological/wording variation
By binning the items into quartiles, we provide a basic stimulus selection framework for researchers, who might be interested in identifying items with a specific level of difficulty or items that elicit a high rate of DR or did not know (DK) items
Summary
General knowledge questions are used across a variety of research and clinical settings to measure cognitive processes such as metacognition, knowledge acquisition, retrieval processes, and intelligence. Cued recall data, including data on the phenomenology of retrieval failures, and multiple-choice data are available These norms will allow researchers to identify questions that are not likely to be known by older adult participants to examine learning or acquisition processes, or to select questions within a range of marginal accessibility, for example. The assumption is that the contents include pre-experimentally acquired information that is relatively stable over the lifespan and can be accessed across contexts (Tulving, 1972, 1985). In this view, general knowledge (GK) is defined as culturally relevant information that is shared by individuals living within a specific social environment. It is important to note that GK varies with demographic variables, such as age and gender (Furnham & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2006)
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