Context memory in younger and older adults: Insights from metacognition

Cognitive aging is characterized by a deterioration of episodic memory functions. Since episodic memory requires retrieval of context, it has been proposed that older adults suffer from a specific deficit in terms of remembering context associated with to-be-remembered information. At the same time, however, it has been argued that providing context information at the time of retrieval can ameliorate age-related memory deficits. These positions can be reconciled if older adults show a deficit in encoding specific, not meaningful (i.e., not related) item-context associations but demonstrate a preserved ability to encode meaningful item-context associations and retrieve them when both items and contexts are provided as cues. In three experiments, we demonstrate such a pattern of deficits and preserved functions by asking younger and older adults to encode pairs of words embedded in contexts, then varying whether these contexts are reinstated when the same pairs of words are restudied. We then examine how this manipulation affects – via spontaneous retrieval of item-context associations – metacognitive monitoring of the effectiveness of restudy in the form of judgments of learning (JOLs). Experiment 1, using semantically unrelated contexts, showed the context reinstatement effect in JOLs only for younger adults. Experiments 2 and 3, promoting encoding of context for older adults by using semantically related contexts, showed effects of context reinstatement for older and younger adults. Together, these results show that older adults sometimes fail to encode specific contextual associations, but if they do encode them, they experience no deficit in spontaneous retrieval of these associations.