When does prior knowledge disproportionately benefit older adults' memory?

Badham, S.P. ORCID: 0000-0002-6890-102X, Hay, M., Foxon, N., Kaur, K. and Maylor, E.A., 2016. When does prior knowledge disproportionately benefit older adults' memory? Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 23 (3), pp. 1-28. ISSN 1382-5585

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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).

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
Creators:	Badham, S.P., Hay, M., Foxon, N., Kaur, K. and Maylor, E.A.
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Date:	2016
Volume:	23
Number:	3
ISSN:	1382-5585
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1080/13825585.2015.1099607 DOI
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	20 Apr 2016 13:43
Last Modified:	18 Oct 2017 15:21
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27657

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