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Updated: Jun 25, 2026

A Real-world What-Where-When Memory Test
Published on: May 16, 2017
The influence of age on memory for distinctive events
Lisa Geraci1, Mark A McDaniel, Isabel Manzano
1Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. lgeraci@tamu.edu
Abstract:
We examined whether memory for distinctive events is influenced by aging. To do so, we used a semantic isolation paradigm in which people show superior memory for a word when it is presented in a list of items from a different semantic category (e.g., the word table is presented in a list of all bird exemplars) as compared with when the same word (table) is presented in a list of unrelated words. Results showed that both younger and older adults demonstrated an isolation effect in memory, although older adults showed a numerically smaller isolation effect than did younger adults. Results suggest that in contrast with previous findings (Cimbalo & Brink, 1982), older adults can take advantage of this type of distinctiveness to aid memory performance.
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