Effects of semantically related and unrelated contexts on recognition memory of different-aged adults

Two experiments were conducted to examine adult age differences in the use of context information. In Experiment 1, the encoding of contextually influenced semantic features was examined, and the encodings of target words by both young and old adults were observed to be influenced by semantic information provided by the context. Older adults did make more semantic confusion errors, however, suggesting less distinctive encoding. Verbal ability also influenced performance, with the difference between ability groups being similar to that between age groups. In Experiment 2, target words were presented in semantically unrelated contexts, and older adults were found not to encode contextual information in this situation. It is hypothesized that the older adults' context effects in Experiment 1 were due to automatic activation of nonspecific word meaning features due to the relation between target and context. When no such familiar context existed, the older adults were less likely to use context information.