Can familiarity with a task erase older adults' memory gap?
Older adults looked at the important actions and remembered them as well as young adults when they watched familiar activities, but fell behind on unfamiliar ones.
Source
Knowledge guides attention to goal-relevant information in older adults
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Mixed design: young vs. older adults (between groups) each watched four silent videos of everyday activities, two more familiar to older adults and two more familiar to young adults (within subjects), with eye tracking and later memory tests
- N
- N=63 · 63 participants (33 young, 30 older adults); three older and two young adults who could not be calibrated were dropped from the eye-tracking analyses only
- Population
- Young adult university students and healthy, community-dwelling older adults screened for dementia in Kansas, USA
- Outcome
- Proportion of viewing time on goal-relevant areas of interest; composite event memory from free recall, recognition and order tests
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What they did
Young and older adults watched four silent videos of an actor doing everyday tasks while an eye tracker recorded where they looked. Two tasks, balancing a checkbook and planting flowers, were chosen through pilot studies as more familiar to older adults, and two, setting up a video game console and installing a printer, as more familiar to young adults. The researchers marked the object relevant to the actor's current goal in every frame and measured how much viewing time fell on it. After each video and a short distractor task, participants recalled the activity and completed picture-recognition and order-memory tests.
What they found
When watching the young adults' activities, older adults spent less time on the goal-relevant objects than young adults did (proportions of about 0.33 vs. 0.37), but on the older adults' activities the two groups were identical (both about 0.42). Memory followed the same pattern: young adults remembered the young-adult activities almost one standard deviation better, yet the age difference on the older-adult activities was not significant. In exploratory analyses, people of both ages who performed an activity often looked more at goal-relevant information and remembered it better, and more looking at goal-relevant objects predicted better free recall, though not recognition or order memory.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Only four videos were used, and two of them (printer and flowers) turned out to be fairly familiar to both groups, so much of the effect rests on the checkbook and game-console videos. Familiarity was not randomly assigned but came with age and life experience, so other differences between the activities could contribute. The study cannot tell whether knowledge actually boosted older adults' memory up to young adults' level or whether the older-adult tasks were simply less sensitive to age differences. All actors were young, which may have affected older viewers, and the link between gaze and memory is correlational.
Key terms
- Event model
- A person's ongoing mental representation of what is happening right now in an event, built from incoming perception plus prior knowledge.
- Schema / script
- Stored general knowledge about how a type of situation or activity usually unfolds, such as the steps in making coffee.
- Area of interest (AOI)
- A region of the screen defined by researchers so they can measure how much of a viewer's gaze falls on it; here it moved with the goal-relevant object.
- Tyranny of Film
- The finding that in edited films viewers' eyes are driven so strongly by the visual content that their understanding barely changes where they look.
- Episodic memory
- Memory for specific experienced events, including what happened and in what order, which typically declines with age.
- SPECT
- Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory, which proposes that the viewer's event model guides where attention goes and attention in turn shapes comprehension.
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Quiz yourself
Which activities were chosen as more familiar to older adults?
Common questions
Why does this matter for ageing research?
It shows that older adults' lower memory scores are not fixed: when they can draw on well-practised knowledge, they direct attention efficiently and remember events as well as young adults, suggesting knowledge can compensate for declining basic abilities.
Couldn't older adults just be looking at whatever is visually bright or moving?
Visual salience would be the same for both age groups, so it cannot easily explain why the age gap in looking appears only for the unfamiliar activities.
What intervention do the authors suggest?
Besides training abilities that decline with age, older adults could be taught knowledge about new activities so that their schemas guide attention to the important parts and support memory.
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