Knowledge of semantic categories in normal aged: Influence of education

Abstract

Semantic memory seems to resist the effects of time, remaining stable even in more advanced ages.ObjectiveTo verify the effect of schooling level on semantic knowledge (non-living items) in normal aged.Method48 aged individuals were divided into three groups (based on schooling) and evaluated. Three tests were applied: verbal fluency, naming and figure classification.ResultsWe verified that the group with greater schooling (>8 years) differed to the illiterate and low schooling groups in most of the tasks, evoking more items in verbal fluency, correctly naming more items and presenting a greater number of “formal categories”.DiscussionIn the verbal fluency test, this difference could be explained by the types of strategies used by the individuals to recall words. In relation to the naming test, the effect could be attributed to limitation in the vocabulary and cognitive processing skills needed to search for semantic attributes of the figures. In categorization, this type of classification is dependent on scholastic learning.ConclusionWe concluded that both illiterate elderly and those having a low schooling level, presented poorer performance in semantic memory tests compared to the aged with a higher level of schooling. The similar behavior evidenced between illiterate and low schooling groups is intriguing. It remains unclear whether the low schooling group behaved like the illiterates or vice-a-versa. This unanswered question remains the subject of future studies.

How formal education and literacy impact on the content and structure of semantic categories

“…As regards animals, as the present participants are urban populations, it seems likely that the number of animals generated is tied to awareness of names of exotic species (e.g., lion, kangaroo), i.e., to encyclopedic knowledge. Nevertheless, the influence of formal education on total output was observed here even with "ecological" categories like domestic utensils and working tools (see [62] for similar data).…”

“…Among the various measures of fluency performance, the number of words generated obviously depends on content knowledge, and several studies showed indeed that people having no formal education (in all studies, illiterate unschooled adults) provide far less responses than formally educated people in semantic fluency tasks [8,10,17,23,48,50,62] (see [34] for similar results on unschooled vs. age-matched schooled children). Although both the ecological or cultural relevance of the chosen semantic criteria and the level of reference to concrete knowledge and specific situations modulate performance [17,51,57,56], an impact of formal education has been reported even in an ecologically relevant, concrete version of the task [62], when participants were asked to name things or food items that can be bought at the supermarket.…”

“…Previous work has suggested that formal education in the Western culture discourages thematic (e.g., functional) thinking (e.g., [30,60,61]) and enhances the richness and precision of semantic knowledge (i.e., content knowledge), with better semantic fluency performance (i.e., number of words generated for a specific taxonomic category) in formally educated adults than in adults having no formal education [8,10,17,23,48,50,62]. Yet, less attention has been paid to the influence of formal education, including literacy, on the structure of semantic categories and on the mechanisms used to access them.…”

“…Although both the ecological or cultural relevance of the chosen semantic criteria and the level of reference to concrete knowledge and specific situations modulate performance [17,51,57,56], an impact of formal education has been reported even in an ecologically relevant, concrete version of the task [62], when participants were asked to name things or food items that can be bought at the supermarket. Other measures that depend on content knowledge also vary with level of education.…”

Impact of emotionally negative information on attentional processes in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease

“…Patients with AD had a lower educational level than age-matched controls, which may have had an impact on their performance, independently from dementia severity. For instance, educational level may influence categorization abilities (Barea and Mansur, 2007), which may boost target or distractor categorization time during visual search (Maier and Abdel Rahman, 2019;Reeder et al, 2016). However, ANCOVAs conducted in the three experimental groups showed no main significant effect of educational level on visual search performance, suggesting that this factor did not explain participants' performance.…”