Context reinstatement reveals preserved context memory specificity in normal aging

Episodic memory specificity declines with healthy aging, as reflected in older adults’ impaired ability to discriminate between similar focal stimuli. Yet, little is known about how aging alters specificity of contextual memory features. Context reinstatement studies showed that young adults incidentally encode task-irrelevant contextual features with a high degree of specificity: focal objects are more frequently judged old when shown with studied backgrounds than with slightly altered lure backgrounds. In this registered report, we investigated the effect of context reinstatement with same, different, and visually similar lure background scenes on mnemonic discrimination for objects in younger and older adults. We found a gradual increase in old responses to both target and lure objects between different, lure, and same context conditions. Contrary to our hypothesis, this effect was present in both age groups, although older adults had a general bias towards old responses. These findings suggest that like younger adults, older adults integrate highly detailed contextual features into episodic memory traces, and that these features can influence mnemonic discrimination responses. Overall, this study highlights the value of indirect tests of context memory to study episodic memory in typical aging.