Of sports and politics: Predicting category-specific retention of news events from demographic variables

Many tests of retrograde amnesia consist of questions on news events. It is therefore important to know how such questions are answered by normal adults. We analysed the retention of news events in a sample of 12,913 participants, who provided basic demographic information and subsequently answered questions about news events randomly sampled from a database. We investigated whether demographic variables could predict differences in the intake and retention of news from several categories, such as sports and business news. Although demographic variables did affect general performance on news questions, differential effects on specific categories were marginal. Gender influenced performance on questions about business news, both age and educational attainment affected performance on political news, and educational attainment also had an effect on performance on science news.