Abstract: According to previous researches about aging and text comprehension, while older adults’ ability of comprehension and memory was decreased in the lower levels of surface form and textbase, the decline in the construction, updating and retrieval of situation model wasn’t observed. Besides summarizing these researches, the reason for older adults’ different ability in the two lower-level processing— surface form and textbase, and situation model processing, the higher-level processing, was analyzed from aspects of the characteristics of situation model and older adults. Further researches were needed in the underlying mechanism and influencing factor of the preserved ability and how it could be used to compensate the decline in other areas of cognitive function caused by natural aging

Key words: text comprehension, aging, representation, situation model