Context reinstatement effects in younger and older adults’ memory: A meta-analysis

Memory improves when encoding and retrieval occur in the same context—a phenomenon known as the context reinstatement (CR) effect. CR is well established in younger adults (Smith & Vela, 2001), yet it remains unclear whether older adults benefit from contextual support as effectively. Addressing this question, this meta-analysis synthesized findings from 22 articles (33 studies, 106 effect sizes, N = 2,177) comparing CR effects in younger and older adults across various types of contexts, encoding instructions, and memory paradigms, thereby extending the previous review by Smith and Vela (2001). Overall, CR reliably enhanced memory in both age groups (Hedges’ g = 0.32), with no age-related difference in effect size. This comparable benefit held despite 72% of primary studies reporting typical age-related declines in memory. This suggests that older adults retain the ability to encode and retrieve item–context associations when strategic retrieval demands are minimized, aligning with the environmental support hypothesis (Craik, 1983) and challenging a strict interpretation of the associative deficit hypothesis (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). Moderator analyses indicated that CR effects were overall weaker when item pairs with associative instructions were encoded, compared to single items. Furthermore, CR effects tended to reduce when switched contexts were familiar, rather than novel at retrieval. No age-specific moderation was found. However, a lack of variation of encoding demands, context types, and memory tests across empirical studies limited statistical power for such moderator analyses. Overall, more research is needed to systematically examine potential conditions under which age differences in CR may emerge.