Prior knowledge shapes older adults' perception and memory for everyday events

Memory for personally experienced events (episodic memory) declines with age; however, memory for facts about the world and the steps involved in completing common actions (semantic memory) remains relatively stable with age. In a series of recent studies, we examined whether older adults could leverage their semantic knowledge to facilitate the acquisition of new episodic memories. Previous studies provided mixed results as to whether top-down processing, such as relevant knowledge, affects encoding, but these studies used young adult participants. Across multiple experiments, we found that semantic knowledge influences encoding processes, such as the ability to parse ongoing activity into discrete events, a process called event segmentation. Here, we review previous literature, and our own recent studies, that examined age-related changes in event segmentation and memory for everyday events, and how semantic knowledge affects these processes. We relate our current findings to previous results, and then we discuss the implications for theories of event cognition and open questions for the field.