Prioritizing meaning: value, prediction, and age differences in sentence processing

Across three experiments, we investigated how people process important but complex information and how this may change with age.

Using an adaptation of the value-directed remembering (VDR) paradigm for sentences that varied in constraint and predictability, younger and older adults read sentences associated with high or low value for subsequent memory tests. Behavioral measures of recall and recognition were collected, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during reading to examine the processing strategies engaged during sentence comprehension.

Behaviorally, both younger and older adults used value information to prioritize memory, showing better recall for high- than low-value sentences, alongside patterns consistent with prediction-based memory distortions (e.g., increased false recognition for predictable but unseen items). At the neural level, across age groups, a post-N400 anterior positivity elicited by unexpected words in strongly constraining sentences, a pattern associated with revising disconfirmed predictions, was not modulated by value. In contrast, value reliably influenced a late frontal negativity elicited by moderately to strongly expected words and thought to reflect message-level integration, with larger effects for high-value sentences. Younger adults also showed enhanced N400 expectancy effects for high-value items, indicating increased semantic facilitation, whereas older adults did not show value-based modulation of the N400. Sorting ERPs by subsequent recall revealed little evidence that sentence-final word processing robustly predicted later memory in either group.

Together, these findings suggest that both younger and older adults use value information to prioritize processing, with particularly clear evidence for enhanced message-level integration. At the same time, sensitivity to prediction violations, and the predictive processes that give rise to them, appeared relatively insensitive to value, consistent with the idea that predictive processing operates in a state-like manner. Notably, with sufficient task support, older adults showed evidence of engaging prediction-related processes typically reduced in aging, although this engagement did not extend to modulation of earlier semantic facilitation and did not fully eliminate age-related differences in comprehension.