Memory for Weather Information in Younger and Older Adults: Tests of Verbatim and Gist Memory

ABSTRACT

Background/Study Context: Memory for specific, verbatim details tends to decline with age, and reliance on gist-based information increases. However, instructions that direct attention toward certain types of information can benefit memory accuracy for that information. Previous work has examined gist-based and verbatim memory for images, but little work has utilized stimuli that participants may study in their daily lives, such as a weather forecast.

Methods: The current study examined how younger and older adults recall both general, gist-based information and specific, verbatim details of a weather forecast, and whether differences in the task instructions to focus on gist-based information may affect recall. Two study-test cycles with different forecasts were used to determine whether experience with the task may affect performance.

Results: While there was no effect of additional gist-based instructions on recall of gist-based information, participants who received the additional instructions recalled fewer verbatim details than those who did not. There were no age-related differences in recall of the gist of the forecast, but younger adults correctly recalled more verbatim details than older adults did.

Conclusion: Environmental support and use of gist-based processing can allow both younger and older adults to remember information that can be useful in their daily lives. The current study informs future research on prospective memory and memory for everyday information.

Acknowledgments

We thank Tyson Kerr and Mariam Hovhannisyan for assistance with experimental design, data collection, and analysis. Portions of this research were presented at the 2017 UCLA Research Conference on Aging.

Notes

1. Original data collection treated the between-subjects variable of type of instructions as two different experiments. Because we are primarily interested in gist-based and verbatim recall, we have now collapsed those groups into one experiment.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Aging; Award Number R01 AG044335).