Abstract
ABSTRACTMaterial 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).
Highlights
Background information is summarized inTable 1, where it can be seen that young and older participants did not differ significantly in their years of education, t < 1
These were all were taken from Poppenk, Kohler, and Moscovitch (2010) who had previously found superior memory for the pre-experimentally familiar English proverbs compared with the novel Asian proverbs
Throughout the article, standard null hypothesis tests are accompanied by an estimated Bayes Factor obtained through JASP
Summary
Background information is summarized inTable 1, where it can be seen that young and older participants did not differ significantly in their years of education, t < 1. Amongst the studies in the literature that do and do not show disproportionate effects of prior knowledge on older adults’ memory relative to young, there would appear to be no consistent pattern as a variety of different paradigms reveals both types of age effect.
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