General knowledge questions are used across a variety of research and clinical settings to measure cognitive processes such as metacognition, knowledge acquisition, retrieval processes, and intelligence. Existing norms only report performance in younger adults, rendering them of limited utility for cognitive aging research because of well-documented differences in semantic memory and knowledge as a function of age. Specifically, older adults typically outperform younger adults in tasks assessing retrieval of information from the knowledge base. Here we present older adult performance on 421 general knowledge questions across a range of difficulty levels. Cued recall data, including data on the phenomenology of retrieval failures, and multiple-choice data are available. These norms will allow researchers to identify questions that are not likely to be known by older adult participants to examine learning or acquisition processes, or to select questions within a range of marginal accessibility, for example. Comparisons with young adult data from prior databases confirms previous findings of greater knowledge in older adults and indicates there is preservation of knowledge from early adulthood into older adulthood.

在各种研究和临床环境中都使用常识问题来衡量认知过程，例如元认知，知识获取，检索过程和智力。现有的规范仅报告了年轻人的表现，这使它们在认知老化研究中的作用有限，这是由于语义记录和知识随年龄的变化而有据可查的。具体而言，在评估从知识库中检索信息的任务中，老年人通常要比年轻人好。在这里，我们介绍了在各种难度级别下的421个常识性问题上的老年人表现。可以使用提示的召回数据，包括有关检索失败现象的数据以及多项选择数据。这些规范将使研究人员能够确定老年人参加者不太可能知道的问题，以检查学习或习得过程，或者在边际可及性范围内选择问题。与先前数据库中的年轻成人数据进行比较，证实了以前在老年人中获得更多知识的发现，并表明从早期到成年的知识都得到了保留。