The purpose of this renewal application is to continue and extend our research on the role of context in determining memory performance in old and yound adults. The general focus of the research is to understand how old and young adults' memory is differentially affected by both facilitative and disruptive information in the memory environment. In our earlier work, we distinguished between stimulus-bound context (contextual information presented along with the to-be-remembered information) and environmental context (information extraneous to the memory stimulus and not presented by the experimenter). Our previous work suggests that the stimulus- bound/environmental distinction is an important one, but that the degree of integration between the context and memory stimulus is also important in understanding age-related differences in the use of contextual information. In the proposed research, we outline a program to study age-related differences in the use of contextual information that varies in degree of integration with the memory stimulus. The two general goals of the proposed research are first, to vary the integration of contextual information with the memory stimulus at both the perceptual and semantic level, as well as study the effects of requiring subjects to generate their own integrations. We hypothesize that age effects in the use of contextual information will only occur when a great deal of active integration if required. In other words, we predict that larger age differences will be found with poorly-integrated perceptual and semantic context, and when subjects are require to actively generate the integration themselves. A second general goal is to develop a new paradigm to understand how the aging memory is affected by poorly-integrated, irrelevant contextual information that is typical of competing demands in our every day memory environment at both encoding and retrieval.
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