What we know about memory in general, and age-related decline in memory in particular, almost always comes from various explicit memory tests. However, memory is often expressed outside of testing situations, without deliberate attempts to retrieve information from memory. This spontaneous form of memory retrieval, referred to as reminding, can be measured by its effect on metacognitive judgments such as judgments of learning (JOLs). Here we investigated whether such a metacognitive measure would reveal the
often described age-related impairment in contextual memory. In two experiments, we compared the effects of reinstating the original encoding context at restudy on JOLs rendered by young and older adults. In Experiment 1, using arbitrary contexts, we documented reduced effects of context reinstatement for older adults, suggesting impaired context-induced reminding with aging. In Experiment 2, using contexts semantically related to memoranda, we documented exacerbated effects of context reinstatement for older adults, suggesting intact context-induced reminding with aging. These results indicate that older adults are capable of using context information to support reminding – and thus influence metacognition outside of memory tests – but only when encoding of context is facilitated by schematic support.