Does education influence visuo-spatial and verbal immediate serial recall in healthy older adults?

There are conflicting findings concerning the effect of education on different cognitive measures in late adulthood. The primary aim of the current study was to determine if level of education predicted the efficiency of passive and active visuo-spatial and verbal immediate serial order functions in Italian cognitively healthy elders aged 60–99 years. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to immediately retrieve sequences of positions in forward and backward order using the Corsi Block Tapping Task. In Experiment 2 a further sample of Italian elders was presented the Digit Span test, that is, the forward and backward immediate recall of strings of digits was requested. Our results suggest that level of education impacts significantly the efficiency of visuo-spatial and verbal immediate recall processes in late adulthood. Moreover, the assessment of passive and active working memory processes in older people can be partially biased by schooling effects.