Aging and episodic memory: are elderly adults less likely to make connections between target and contextual information?

The hypothesis that elderly individuals are less likely than young adults to connect target and contextual information was tested. Young and elderly adults were presented with a number of slides, each of which contained a word superimposed in the center of a background picture of a landscape or cityscape. Half of the subjects were told to remember the words and half were told to remember the word-and-background pairs. All subjects were then tested for their recognition memory of the word-and-background pairs. The results indicate that elderly adults have greater difficulty than young adults remembering the connections between words and background pictures but that this occurs whether the pictures are target information or contextual information. Therefore, the results of this study provide no support for the notion that elderly adults have a specific contextual encoding deficit.