An adult development study of contextual memory

This study tested the hypothesis that there is a relatively greater decrease in memory for contextual features than in memory for target information with increasing age. Young, middle-aged, and elderly adults were presented with a number of slides, each of which contained a word centered on a background composed of either a landscape/cityscape or a border design. One third of the subjects were told to remember the words, one third were told to remember the backgrounds, and one third were told to remember the word-and-background pairs. Recognition memory for both words, backgrounds, and word-and-background pairings was tested in all subjects. The interaction between age, instruction condition, and type of information tested was not significant. Thus, there was no support for the hypothesis that older adults have a greater deficit in contextual memory than in memory for target information when compared to younger adults.