Data for: Differential effects of knowledge and aging on the encoding and retrieval of everyday activities

We deconstruct continuous streams of action into smaller, meaningful events. Research has shown that the ability to segment continuous activity into such events and remember their contents declines with age; however, knowledge improves with age. We investigated how young and older adults use knowledge to more efficiently encode and later remember information from everyday events by having participants view a series of self-paced slideshows depicting everyday activities. For some activities, older adults produce more normative scripts than do young adults (older adult activities) and for other activities, young adults produce more normative scripts than do older adults (young adult activities). Overall, participants viewed event boundaries longer than within events (i.e., the event boundary advantage) replicating prior research (e.g., Hard, Recchia, & Tversky, 2011). Importantly, older adults demonstrated the boundary advantage for the older adult activities but not the young adult activities, and they also had better recognition memory for the older adult activities than the young adult activities. We also found that the magnitude of a participant’s boundary advantage was associated with better memory, but only for the less knowledgeable activities. Results indicate that older adults use their intact knowledge to better encode and remember everyday activities, but that knowledge and event segmentation may have independent influences on event memory.

我们将连续的动作流解构为更小的、具有意义的事件单元。已有研究表明，将连续活动分割为上述事件并记忆其内容的能力会随年龄增长而衰退，但个体的知识储备则随年龄增长而提升。本研究通过让被试观看一系列自主控制进度的日常活动幻灯片，探究年轻人与老年人如何运用知识更高效地编码，并在后续记忆日常事件中的信息。针对部分活动，老年人相较于年轻人能生成更符合规范的事件脚本（下称老年人适配活动）；而针对另一部分活动，年轻人的规范脚本生成能力则优于老年人（下称年轻人适配活动）。整体而言，被试对事件边界的注视时长长于事件内部（即「事件边界优势」），这一结果重复了此前的研究结论（如Hard、Recchia与Tversky，2011）。值得注意的是，老年人仅在老年人适配活动中表现出事件边界优势，在年轻人适配活动中则未出现该效应；同时，老年人对老年人适配活动的再认记忆表现也优于年轻人适配活动。此外我们还发现，被试的事件边界优势强度与更优异的记忆表现存在关联，但这一关联仅存在于知识储备相对不足的活动中。研究结果表明，老年人可借助其完好的知识储备更高效地编码并记忆日常活动，但知识储备与事件分割能力或许会对事件记忆产生独立的影响。