Discussion
EVENTS, EVENT
The main goal of the current study was to evaluate whether a knowledge-based intervention would improve older adults’ event segmentation (and encoding of event information), and their memory for everyday events. To do so, we experimentally manipulated semantic knowledge, which has been previously shown to lead to better event segmentation in older adultsWe found that, following the workshops, older adults’ knowledge—as assessed by the expertise survey—increased for both the trained and untrained activities. Increased knowledge scores for the untrained activity are likely due to practice effects from having completed the expertise survey before, because we observed much stronger learning effects for the trained activity (see Fig. Further, the gyoza workshop did not lead to better segmentation for the gyoza activity perhaps because gyoza-making is not as novel to our participants as Tai chi. Although we recruited novices in each activity and people reported having no direct experience making gyozas, most of our participants reported cooking in some capacity (87% report at least taking turns cooking in their home; 42% report specifically using wonton wrappers at least once before). Over time, these cooking experiences create relevant schema and scripts (e.g., gather ingredients, prepare food, cook food) that, on some level, may have facilitated the segmentation and encoding of the gyoza video. This potential issue is similar to that from Zacks et al.: their participants had no direct experience assembling a saxophone, but they have assembled furniture and/or toys, which may explain why the training did not influence segmentation agreement in these activitiesAdditionally, it is possible that the constrained nature of our tasks influenced segmentation behavior. Our tasks included a narrow range of possible actions and outcomes and featured a definite end goal (more so gyoza-making than Tai chi). This aligns with the idea that our tasks were more closely related to the saxophone assembly task from Zacks et al. than the dancing or ice-skating activities from the Blasing Interestingly, we did not observe consistent knowledge-related improvement across all memory measures. We did observe the hypothesized patterns of performance in the recognition data such that the Gyoza group improved more on the gyoza recognition task following the workshops, and the Tai chi group improved more on the Tai chi recognition task. The recognition task required specific knowledge about the structure of the activity to garner a correct response because only the action differed (i.e., actor, setting, and props were consistent). Order memory did increase after the workshops, but it was not specific to the trained activity. Surprisingly, we did not see a knowledge-related benefit in recall performance like has been found in prior studies