The data are a series of studies investigating how knowledge and experience may help alleviate age deficits in memory. This collection is comprised by 3 zip files, each with their own data file, codebook and ReadMe file, as well as the publication resulting. The main focus of the project was to highlight how pre-existing knowledge (familiarity) is used by individuals in memory tasks. The outcome will be to draw distinctions between the processing of familiar information and novel information. Processing of familiar and novel information occurs almost continuously in everyday life and therefore has widespread implications across many areas of psychology, neuroscience, gerontology and medicine. The key aim of the project is to provide foundation and guidance to future research by identifying fundamental aspects of cognition. As the proportion of older adults in society continues to rise in the 21 century, geriatric research is becoming increasingly important. Ageing results in the decline of both physical and cognitive abilities and the most widespread cognitive decline is a reduction in memory ability. Recent research has found that when information is consistent with an individual’s knowledge and experience, it is easier to remember than abstract information and older adults appear to benefit from this effect more than do young adults. For example, when people are asked to remember an association between two words, age differences in memory performance are smaller for related word pairs (article-book, fatigue-sleep) compared to unrelated word pairs (article-lapel, fatigue-glass). It may therefore be possible to improve memory, particularly for older adults, by encouraging individuals to use knowledge and information that they are familiar with to support memory processes. The project will use a range of memory tests to investigate how people can use knowledge about the world to distinguish between different information in memory during retrieval; improve the chances of thinking in the same way when encoding information and when retrieving information; and reduce the amount of effort required to successfully encode and retrieve information.

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