The Effects of Previously Acquired Knowledge on Memory for Textual Information

The present experiment was designed to examine how the semantic memory store of previously acquired knowledge affects the ability of young and old adults to retain textual information. The participants were presented with a series of biographical passages and were told they concerned either a famous historical character or a fictitious character. In an immediate recognition test, both young and old adults were able to discriminate between test and distractor sentences. However, in the delayed recognition condition, older adults had considerable difficulty in differentiating between target and distractor sentences, particularly in the famous character story condition. It was thought that as the older adults' episodic memory for the story deteriorated, they were unable to discriminate successfully between their store of previously acquired knowledge and the recently learned textual information.