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Arielle Syssau, Denis Brouillet
Aging is accompanied generally by a deterioration of some cognitive functions, especially memory. In this article, we consider the influence of affective words and text connotation on the memory of deficient elderly people.
In a first study, we examined memory for affective and neutral word list. The affective connotation improved deficient subject's performances, but it had no influence on non-deficient subjects' performances.
In a second study, we examined memory for different types of texts : narrative or descriptive, affective or neutral. The narrative structure exerted a positive effect on deficient subjects' performances. They obtained comparable performances to those of non-deficient subjects. The affective connotation played a role for non- structured texts (descriptive) and had no influence on narrative texts.
These results seem to indicate that narrative structure and affective connotation play the role of indices in the recovery of information for deficient elderly people.
