Abstract
Prior knowledge is essential to make predictions about the world and to guide our gaze. Previously, it has been suggested that older adults tend to rely more on prior knowledge, which, in turn, can affect active vision and memory performance in case of inaccurate predictions. While younger adults’ memory performance benefits from schema violations, the effects on older adults’ memory remain controversial. Here, we studied age effects on this memory advantage in a sample of 23 younger (mean age: 26.8 years) and 23 older adults (mean age: 69.3 years). In an encoding phase, participants viewed 60 images of real-world scenes taken from the SCEGRAM database. These scenes contained target objects that were either semantically congruent or incongruent with the scene context (e.g. shampoo in the shower versus in the fridge). After a delay, participants indicated for 60 target and 60 additional distractor objects whether they had been presented during the encoding phase. Subsequently, they provided a confidence judgment. If they responded that they recognized the object, they were asked to select one out of three scenes in which it was previously presented. Using a signal detection approach, we analyzed participants’ memory performance for congruent and incongruent target objects. Recognition of congruent targets was not affected by age. However, while schema violations were overall beneficial for memory performance in both age groups, this advantage was significantly less pronounced in older adults. Preliminary analyses of eye movements suggest a relationship between fixation duration on target objects during encoding and memory performance. In addition, analyses of scene memory revealed that older adults’ memory representations were biased more towards congruent information. We suggest that encoding of incongruent objects is strengthened in both age groups, but aging compromises decoding for recognition due to down-weighting of schema violations.