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

= 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).