Conference Papers Year : 2022

The protective effect of educational level varies as a function of the difficulty of the memory task in ageing

Abstract

Episodic memory and the use of mnemonic strategies decline with age. It is unclear how educational level reduces these declines as a function of task difficulty. Younger and older adults had to memorise a word list where the words were either already semantically grouped (easy) or presented in pseudo-random order (hard). Contrary to younger adults, older adults with a higher educational level recalled more words than those with a lower educational level in the easy memory task, but they both showed similar recall performance on the harder memory task. Moreover, overall, older adults used the semantic organisation as much as younger adults when the memory task was easy, but less when the task was hard. In sum, the protective effect of educational level seems to be restricted on recall performance, but not organisational strategies, in easy memory tasks providing sufficient external information about the most efficient mnemonic strategy to use.

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Dates and versions

hal-05230092 , version 1 (29-08-2025)

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  • HAL Id : hal-05230092 , version 1

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Aurélien Frick, Helen R. Wright, Séverine Fay, Sandrine Vanneste, Lucie Angel, et al.. The protective effect of educational level varies as a function of the difficulty of the memory task in ageing. 2022 Annual Meeting of the Belgian Association of Psychological Sciences, Belgian Association for Psychological Science (BAPS), Jun 2022, Louvain, Belgium. ⟨hal-05230092⟩
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