Situation models and aging

Younger and older adults were tested for their ability to process and retri eve information from texts. The authors focused on the construction and ret rieval of situation models relative to other types of text representations. The results showed that during memory retrieval, younger adults showed sup erior memory for surface form and textbase knowledge (what the text was), w hereas older adults had equivalent or superior memory for situation model i nformation (,,khat the text was about). The results also showed that during reading, older and younger adults were similar in their sensitivity to var ious aspects of the texts, Overall, these findings suggest that although th ere are age-related declines in the processing and memory for text-based in formation, for higher level representations, these abilities appear to be p reserved, Several possibilities for why this is the case are discussed, inc luding an in-depth consideration of one possibility that involves W. Kintsc h's (1988) construction-integration model.