Abstract
Episodic memory tasks are generally less well performed by elderly than by young adult subjects. It has been suggested that this age effect could result from the lack of spontaneous effective encoding and retrieval strategies, while these strategies are still available as can be shown when encoding cues are provided by the experimenter. In addition, the efficacy of such cues could depend on the subject's educational level. In the present study, young vs elderly subjects, of high vs low educational level, were enrolled in the cued-recall task of 48 items designed by Buschke and Grober (1986). In subjects with a low educational level, it appeared that the cues were insufficient to suppress the differences of performance between elderly and young subjects. More precisely, two main points emerged. Firstly, in highly educated samples, age does not matter much, at least for this kind of memory task. Secondly, with advancing age, the level of education becomes a more important predictor of memory efficiency than age, since the old-low sample performed less well than the other groups in every stage of the test.