Relationships between Age, Domain Knowledge and Prior Knowledge Pre-activation on Information Searching.

This study investigated the effects of age, prior domain knowledge and prior knowledge semantic pre-activation task on information searching. Results showed that the age-related differences were observed for the fantastic movies domain (for which older adults had significantly lower prior knowledge), whereas the effects of age were not replicated in the health domain (for which older adults had equal knowledge with young adults?). Semantic pre-activation of prior knowledge in the health domain was correlated to more analytic strategies when processing the search engine pages and when navigating.