A developmental analysis of story recall and comprehension in adulthood

The role of organization in adults' processing of stories was examined. Young, middle-aged, and old adults were asked to recall or make importance judgments about canonical stories, in which the order of mention of events corresponded to their order in the underlying structure of the story, and noncanonical stories, in which the order of mention of events did not correspond to their underlying order. Canonical stories were better recalled than noncanonical stories by all three age groups, and a variety of measures indicated that older adults' recall was both quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of young adults. In addition, the three age groups made similar judgments of importance. The results are discussed in terms of developmental differences in processing of schematically organized stimuli versus stimuli that lack a schematic organization and in terms of the development and maintenance of metacognitive knowledge.