Contextual encoding by young and elderly adults as revealed by cued and free recall

Past research has shown that enriched, elaborative encoding improves memory performance. Two experiments are reported that attempt to assess whether simply encountering a word in a highly constraining sentence context is sufficient to facilitate recall for these words on a later unexpected recall test. Young and elderly adults were first tested in a word recognition study using word-onset gating, for words heard in sentence frames that provided different degrees of context, either as a single task, or under conditions of dual-task interference. Recall accuracy for the words depended on the degree of context in which the words had originally been encountered in the gating study, but the shapes of the recall functions differed in cued versus free recall. Parallel results were obtained for both age groups, and for words that had or had not been originally encountered under dual-task conditions. Results extend the concept of elaborative processing beyond those conditions under which it was originally demonstrated.