Direct and indirect assessments of memory for script-based narratives in young and older adults

Direct (recall) and indirect (reading speed facilitation) assessments of memory for narratives describing a series of scripted activities were obtained for groups of young and older adults. Significant age effects were obtained for recall, with between-group differences increasing as the script-relatedness of the stimulus information decreased. In contrast, no age differences were observed in reading speed facilitation, with young and older adults benefitting equally from previous exposure to the stimulus actions. This suggests that younger adults and older adults are similar in their ability to encode individual action information, but older adults have difficulty establishing relations between actions, especially when the action's relationship to the scripted activity is not obvious. Verbal processing capacity (reading span) was found to be more predictive of recall performance in the older adults than in the younger adults, but the recall-span association was not as strong as expected.