Memory for temporal context: Effects of aging and encoding conditions

Whether the memory for temporal context information is mediated by automatic or controlled processes is a matter of debate. If the coding of temporal context information is automatic, memory for temporal context should not be affected by intention to learn and aging. In order to address this issue, we administered a list discrimination task to young and older adults in either an incidental or an intentional encoding condition. The results showed that the list discrimination performance of the older adults was inferior to the performance of the young subjects. In addition, both young and older subjects’ discrimination performance did not improve in the intentional encoding condition. These results support the hypotheses that the temporal context of an item is encoded automatically.