Unbinding of contextual information: age differences and cultural effects

Age and cultural effects on memory for complex pictures were examined under an unbinding condition. Young and older Canadians and Chinese were tested in Toronto and Beijing respectively. At encoding, participants viewed semantically congruent or incongruent pictures. At recognition, they were asked to recognize the objects and backgrounds of these pictures in isolation. The results revealed effects of both age and culture on recognition performance. Older adults recognized more objects than young adults, whereas Canadians were better than Chinese in background recognition. There was also a trend for Canadian older adults to recognize more objects and backgrounds than the other groups of participants. Age and cultural differences in memory under unbinding were possibly due to group differences in information binding during encoding. Finally, it was found that images from congruent pictures were better recognized than those from incongruent pictures, suggesting that semantic relatedness of information improves recognition under unbinding.