Direct and indirect measures of contextual information: Older versus young adult subjects

Several reports in the literature suggest that older adults have impaired memory for contextual information. Support for this approach was derived from studies that tested different aspects of contextual information by direct measures of memory (i.e., recall or recognition). The purpose of the present study is twofold: first, to test the possibility that contextual information, although inaccessible via direct measures, may be evident via indirect measures of memory; and second, to evaluate the contribution of duration of exposure to direct and indirect memory measures of contextual information. Two groups of subjects participated in the present study, 35 younger and 30 older subjects. Duration of exposure was not found to have a differential effect on the groups, in either direct or indirect memory tasks. As predicted, age-related differences emerged when direct, but not indirect, measures of contextual memory were tested. These findings argue against the context-memory deficit hypothesis in elderly subjects, and are interpreted in terms of the theoretical distinction between implicit and explicit memory, where the former is found to be preserved in older adult subjects.