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The Effects of Age and Domain Knowledge on Text Processing

Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.

Address correspondence to Lisa M. Soederberg Miller, Brandeis University, Department of Psychology, Waltham, MA 02454-9110. E-mail: lmiller{at}brandeis.edu

The author investigated age differences in the effects of knowledge during encoding by comparing time allocated to naturalistic domain-related (cooking) and general texts among young and older adults with varying levels of (cooking) knowledge. High-knowledge individuals increased time allocated to conceptual integration when reading domain-related texts but not general texts and showed relatively greater recall for domain-related texts. These findings suggest that knowledge application can be effortful during encoding and that this effort pays off in terms of a more elaborated and integrated text representation that engenders better memory performance. There were no age differences in effects of knowledge on either resource allocation at encoding or on memory performance. These results suggest that knowledge-based processing is preserved in later life.

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