To learn or not to learn: Spontaneous name learning strategies in young and older adults

People’s names are notoriously challenging to learn at all ages, more so than semantic information. Because people are somewhat aware of memory limitations and of the difficulty of learning names, they might use cost-efficient encoding strategies whereby they devote more memory resources to the names of people that are most likely to be useful to learn than others. To test this hypothesis, we told young and older participants that they would judge excerpts of a new Belgian TV series about a group of 12 musicians and that they could first review information about the characters to facilitate the upcoming viewing. Information to review consisted of the character’s pictures, their first name and their instrument. The probability of appearance of each character in the series was also specified via an importance label (Main, lead or extra; with four characters per category). We then subjected participants to a cued recall test and asked them to recall names, instruments and importance labels associated with pictures. Preliminary results suggest that young adults have better memory performance than older ones and that semantic information (instruments) is better recalled than names. In line with a cost-efficient encoding strategy, participants in both groups tended to prioritise learning names and semantic information of the most important characters to the detriment of others. Interestingly, individuals who used that strategy with names also used it with semantic information.