Age Differences in Context Use During Reading and Downstream Effects on Recognition Memory

Abstract

It is well-known that sentential context modulates sentence processing. But does context also have effects that extend beyond the immediate moment, for example, by impacting the memory representations that people store? And are there age-related differences in this process? Here, we investigated this question. German readers who varied in age self-paced through constraining sentences that continued in a predictable or less predictable fashion. Participants’ recognition memory was then tested for previously seen (i.e., “old”) words and for initially predictable but not actually presented words (i.e., “lures”). The results showed that readers of all ages slowed down when reading unpredictable sentences. However, aging individuals maintained less sentence-specific information than younger adults: They not only understood sentential materials less correctly on the fly, but they also showed disproportionate rates of false remembering and less successful old–new discrimination in the recognition memory test. Of note, rates of false remembering were reduced in those aging readers who allocated more time toward reading unpredictable sentence continuations. Together, our results show that aging increases reliance on gist or schema-congruent processing but that more attentive encoding of text can buffer against some of the resulting memory distortions.