Older Adults Sometimes Benefit from Environmental Support: Evidence from Reading Distorted Text

Abstract

An implication of the generally assumed age-related deficit in processing resources is that older adults should be more reliant on support in the task environment than younger adults in any cognitive task. This notion, an extension of Craik's (1986) environmental support framework for memory, was investigated in four studies of reading. In Experiment 1, two distorted texts varied in the amount of irrelevant words created by rearrangement of the spaces between words. The irrelevant words were predicted to attract attention, and thus slow reading. Older adults were much more slowed than were younger adults by loss of support for reading. In Experiment 2, emphasized irrelevant words disrupted reading more than did de-emphasized ones, but not more so for older adults. These results were replicated in two further experiments using individual sentences rather than running texts. These results suggest that environmental support affects younger and older adults differently, but that this claim must be qualified by task-specific characteristics. Theoretical and practical implications of such qualifications are discussed.