Older people who read text-based information appear to have increased comprehension and better memory retention of the content when the information is presented along with an elaboration of the facts versus simple factoids, particularly compared with younger readers who can remember and understand simple facts without an elaborated context, according to new study findings presented in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.

In the trial, researchers sought to compare the influence of sentence elaboration on learning from text-based and discourse-based sentences among 45 subjects aged 18 to 29 years and 47 subjects aged 55 to 82 years. All participants read a series of sentences about historical landmarks, tourism, nature and individuals in Connecticut and Rhode Island. None of the information in the sentences was based on other sentences so that there was no coherence between any of the facts.

The amount of information presented in each sentence also varied. The sentences ranged from simple, short facts such as “The state flower of Rhode Island is the violet,” to a more elaborate presentation of facts such as, “Observation Tower, a 100-foot high wooden tower at Hanna Robinson Park, sits on a natural wooded hill, providing a panoramic view of Narragansett Bay and the rugged uneven shoreline of Rhode Island.”

According to the results of a free recall test, the younger group was more likely to remember information presented in the factoid sentences than the more elaborate sentences. They were able to recall nearly half of the factoids, but they remember less then a third of the elaborated facts. For example, the younger group could recall nearly half of the factoids, but they remembered less than a third of the elaborated sentences.

However, the older group showed better recall of the highly elaborated sentences than the younger group.  “The differentially poor memory among older adults for factoids is likely due to the fact that there was inadequate context to enable engagement of the discourse-level processor, creating demands, which they are less able to meet,” the authors indicated.

Similar findings were noted during the cued recall test, in which the answers were slightly prompted. The younger subjects demonstrated greater recall than older subjects, particularly for factoids. No between-group differences were noted, however, in cued recall for low elaboration and high elaboration conditions.

“These findings provide some support for the notion that textbase- and discourse-level representations are dissociable processors and suggest that differential engagement of these processors with age may be important in understanding age differences in text comprehension,” the researchers concluded.

“Our results offer implications for methods of designing real-world text in ways that can potentially reduce age deficits in text processing and comprehension.”