Schemas help older adults compensate for age-related memory decline, study finds

According to a new study published in Cognition, schema knowledge compensates for age-related memory decline by filling in the gaps when recollection fails.

As we age, our episodic memory—that is, recalling specific events and experiences—tends to decline. However, this decline does not affect all types of information equally. Research has shown that when information aligns with pre-existing knowledge or schemas, older adults often perform as well as younger adults. There are two main theories explaining how schemas influence memory in older adults: the compensatory theory, which suggests that schemas help fill in gaps caused by memory failures, and the inhibitory deficit theory, which argues that schemas interfere with memory by causing confusion with incongruent information.

Evidence has been inconclusive due to the complexity of isolating memory and schema effects. In this work, Michelle M. Ramey and colleagues sought to directly examine these effects.

The study involved 70 participants, including 35 older adults aged 62-87 years and 35 younger adults aged 18-23 years. The online experiment consisted of two phases: a study phase and a test phase. During the study phase, participants searched for target objects in 60 unique scenes, each presented twice. The objects were either placed in schema-congruent locations (e.g., a coffee cup on a coffee table) or schema-incongruent locations (e.g., a coffee cup on the floor). In the test phase, participants were shown 80 scenes (60 old and 20 new) without the target objects and were asked to recall the target object’s location and rate their memory confidence on a 6-point scale.

The study revealed that older adults exhibited higher schema bias than younger adults, indicating that their memory decisions were more influenced by schema congruency. Specifically, older adults’ spatial recall accuracy was better for schema-congruent scenes compared to incongruent scenes, and this effect was larger than in younger adults. Importantly, the researchers discovered that this schema bias was primarily driven by recollection failures in older adults. When older adults had poor recollection, they relied more on schema knowledge to fill in the gaps, providing evidence for the compensatory theory.

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Additionally, older adults’ spatial accuracy within recollected scenes was lower than that of younger adults, even when they correctly remembered the scenes. This suggests that older adults have poorer memory precision and rely more on schemas when their memory is less precise. However, within familiar scenes, older adults performed similarly to younger adults, indicating that familiarity-based memory was not impaired by aging.

A limitation outlined by the authors is that the study was conducted online due to COVID-19 precautions, which may have introduced variability in participants’ testing environments.

The study, “How schema knowledge influences memory in older adults: Filling in the gaps, or leading memory astray?”, was authored by Michelle M. Ramey, Andrew P. Yonelinas, and John M. Henderson.