Two experiments compared effects of integrative and semantic relations between pairs of words on lexical and memory processes in old age. Integrative relations occur when two dissimilar and unassociated words are linked together to form a coherent phrase (e.g., horse-doctor). In Experiment 1, older adults completed a lexical decision task where prime and target words were related either integratively or semantically. The two types of relation both facilitated responses compared to a baseline condition, demonstrating that priming can occur in older adults with minimal preexisting associations between primes and targets. In Experiment 2, young and older adults completed a cued recall task with integrative, semantic and unrelated word pairs. Both integrative and semantic pairs showed significantly smaller age differences in associative memory compared to unrelated pairs. Integrative relations facilitated older adults" memory to a similar extent as semantic relations despite having few preexisting associations in memory.Integratability of stimuli is therefore a new factor that reduces associative deficits in older adults, most likely by supporting encoding and retrieval mechanisms. showing greater age-related differences than others (e.g., Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000). In particular, episodic and contextual memory tend to exhibit larger age differences than content or item memory (Spencer & Raz, 1995). Naveh-Benjamin (2000) thus proposed an associative deficit hypothesis whereby older adults show specific deficits in forming associations between items. Naveh-Benjamin presented for study several pairs of unrelated words and then tested young and older adults" item memory (i.e., recognizing studied vs. new words) and their associative memory (i.e., recognizing intact vs. rearranged pairs). Older adults showed greater age deficits for associative memory than for item memory. A recent meta-analysis demonstrated that many studies have shown similar results (Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008).Research into age-related associative deficits has attempted to establish factors that can alleviate this memory deficit. One such factor is the semantic relatedness between to-beassociated items. Items are semantically related if they belong in the same category, such as shirt and sock, or are otherwise featurally similar, such as apple and ball. Naveh-Benjamin (2000, Exp. 4), Naveh-Benjamin, Hussain, Guez, and Bar-On (2003, Exp. 2) and Naveh-Benjamin, Craik, Guez, and Kreuger (2005 showed a reduction in age differences for associative memory with semantically related word pairs (e.g., shirt and sock) compared to unrelated word pairs (e.g., shirt and apple). Therefore, older adults are able to use semantic relations to enhance their associative memory performance relative to young adults. This finding suggests that older adults" associative memory deficit may be specific to new associations; older adults" memory for preexisting associations appears to be relatively unimpaired. Indeed, MacKay and Burke (1990) and Naveh-Benjamin an...

Material consistent with knowledge/experience is generally more memorable than material inconsistent with knowledge/experience – an effect that can be more extreme in older adults. Four experiments investigated knowledge effects on memory with young and older adults. Memory for familiar and unfamiliar proverbs (Experiment 1) and for common and uncommon scenes (Experiment 2) showed similar knowledge effects across age groups. Memory for person-consistent and person-neutral actions (Experiment 3) showed a greater benefit of prior knowledge in older adults. For cued recall of related and unrelated word pairs (Experiment 4), older adults benefited more from prior knowledge only when it provided uniquely useful additional information beyond the episodic association itself. The current data and literature suggest that prior knowledge has the age-dissociable mnemonic properties of (1) improving memory for the episodes themselves (age invariant), and (2) providing conceptual information about the tasks/stimuli extrinsically to the actual episodic memory (particularly aiding older adults).

Stimuli related to an individual’s knowledge/experience are often more memorable than abstract stimuli, particularly for older adults. This has been found when material that is congruent with knowledge is contrasted with material that is incongruent with knowledge, but there is little research on a possible graded effect of congruency. The present study manipulated the degree of congruency of study material with participants’ knowledge. Young and older participants associated two famous names to nonfamous faces, where the similarity between the nonfamous faces and the real famous individuals varied. These associations were incrementally easier to remember as the name–face combinations became more congruent with prior knowledge, demonstrating a graded congruency effect, as opposed to an effect based simply on the presence or absence of associations to prior knowledge. Older adults tended to show greater susceptibility to the effect than young adults, with a significant age difference for extreme stimuli, in line with previous literature showing that schematic support in memory tasks particularly benefits older adults.