Aging and Interference in Story Recall

Abstract

Background/Study Context: According to inhibitory deficit theory, older adults should be more impaired by visual distractors than younger adults when reading texts. Studies using a multiple-choice recognition test to examine age differences in the impairment of text comprehension due to distractor words yielded inconsistent results.

Methods: In the present study, younger participants and older participants were required to read short texts comprising unrelated, related, or no distractor words. Visual acuity was equated between groups. Text recall was assessed using a gist-based propositional scoring procedure.

Results: There were pronounced age differences in reading with distraction. Older adults were slowed down more than younger adults by the presence of distractor words when reading. Furthermore, older adults’ story recall was clearly impaired by the presence of distractor material, whereas younger adults’ recall performance was not. In addition, older adults were more likely to make intrusion errors.

Conclusion: Consistent with inhibitory deficit theory, the findings suggest that older adults were less able than younger adults to establish a correct mental representation of the target text when distractors were present. Furthermore, older adults were more likely than younger adults to build up incorrect memory representations that comprise distractor concepts. Thus, there are pronounced age differences in the impairment of text comprehension by distracting information.

Notes

¹Duchek et al. (1998) report an analysis of proportional increase in reading time relative to the control condition, but they report only the global interaction between distractor condition and group, and they examined younger adults, older adults, and Alzheimer's patients. Therefore, it is unclear whether the significant interaction between group and condition can be attributed to the effects of normal aging.

Note: “Yes” indicates findings that suggest an age-related increase in distractibility (i.e., a significant interaction between age group and distractor condition). “No” indicates the absence of age differences in distractibility. Studies marked with a – (—) did not report the relevant comparison of distractibility as a function of age group in the particular variable.

²Note that Li et al. (1998) converted the MFC questions into a cued-recall task, in which participants were asked to recall the target word. Obviously, this procedure is also not suited to reveal age differences in the susceptibility to interference within the mental representation of a whole text, i.e., a network of activated semantic concepts and their connections.