Patricia Eno Iwok, “The Impact of Prior Knowledge on Scene Recognition in Older and Younger Adults”
Mentor: Caitlin Bowman, Psychology, Letters & Science (College of)
Poster #27
Prior knowledge refers to the experiences and information we bring to new situations, and having prior knowledge can sometimes facilitate new learning. However, it can also sometimes hinder new learning when it prevents us from paying attention to the peculiarities of the current experience (Koutstaal & Schacter, 1997). With older age, there is a decline in memory for individual experiences (Greene & Naveh-Benjami, 2023), but it is not known if prior knowledge can offset this age deficit. This study investigates how prior knowledge affects younger and older adults’ ability to remember scene images. To manipulate prior knowledge, we included scene images of famous locations that participants were likely to have prior knowledge of (e.g., Big Ben) and matched non-famous locations (e.g., Clock of Erbil). We recruited 23 younger adults (ages 18–30) from UWM’s psychology students and 24 older adults (ages 60–80) from the Milwaukee community. Participants completed a mnemonic where they viewed the images of famous and non-famous locations. Later, they completed a memory test where they were presented with four images of the same location and were asked to identify which was the exact image they had seen previously. Results indicated that prior knowledge did not aid or hinder memory performance. However, there was a clear age-related difference, with younger adults outperforming older adults, especially for non-famous locations. Thus, prior knowledge may be somewhat more beneficial in older age.