An adult developmental study of the encoding of spatial location

The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that there is a differential deficit in the ability to encode contextual information with increasing age. Young, middle-aged, and elderly adults were shown target words in various quadrants of a computer screen (contexts) and were told to either (a) remember the words and their locations, (b) remember the words, or (c) tell whether the words referred to something that was alive or not. Following presentation of the words, subjects were given a recognition test for the words and were asked to identify the quadrant in which each word had been presented. If older adults have a contextual encoding deficit, than an interaction between age and instruction condition would be expected in memory for quadrants. Older adults would be expected to perform better relative to younger adults when the locations were target information (intentionally learned) than when they were contextual (not intentionally learned). Since such an interaction was not obtained, the results provide no support for the hypothesis that the elderly have an encoding deficit that is specific to contextual information.