Differential effects of knowledge and aging on the encoding and retrieval of everyday activities

Effects of Language Proficiency on Selective Attention Patterns at Segmenting Boundaries in English Audio Sentences

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES

Normative perceptual segmentation facilitates event perception, comprehension, and memory. Given that native English listeners' normative perceptual segmentation of English speech streams coexists with a highly selective attention pattern at segmentation boundaries, it is significant to test whether Chinese learners of English have a different attention pattern at boundaries, thereby checking whether they perform a normative segmentation.

METHODS

Thirty Chinese learners of English with relatively higher language proficiency (CLH) and 26 with relatively lower language proficiency (CLL) listened to a series of English audio sentences. Meanwhile, they were asked to press the key whenever a phonetic probe "ba" occurred. Response time to "ba" reflects the attention where "ba" is located at segmentation boundaries.

RESULTS

The results revealed that, (1) relative to native English listeners' highly selective attention pattern, the CLH group showed a relatively selective attention pattern, while the CLL group displayed a non-selective attention pattern. (2) Both the CLH group and natives had better recognition memory than the CLL group. (3) Both the CLH group and natives' attention at segmentation boundaries was not correlated with their memory for sentences, while the CLL group's attention at boundaries was correlated with memory.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest that (1) Chinese learners of English did not perform a normative segmentation, which shows the effect of English proficiency on perceptual segmentation; (2) English proficiency has a superior effect on memory for sentences, while perceptual segmentation would come next to support memory by providing structure for memory construction if English proficiency is not high; (3) a comparison of attention patterns between Chinese learners and natives can provide a reference for potential intervention to rectify non-natives, thereby improving their perception of English speech streams.

Working memory capacity for continuous events: The root of temporal compression in episodic memory?

Remembering the unfolding of past episodes usually takes less time than their actual duration. In this study, we evaluated whether such temporal compression emerges when continuous events are too long to be fully held in working memory. To do so, we asked 90 young adults to watch and mentally replay video clips showing people performing a continuous action (e.g., turning a car jack) that lasted 3, 6, 9, 12, or 15 s. For each clip, participants had to carefully watch the event and then to mentally replay it as accurately and precisely as possible. Results showed that mental replay durations increased with event duration but in a non-linear manner: they were close to the actual event duration for short videos (3-9 s), but significantly smaller for longer videos (12 and 15 s). These results suggest that working memory is temporally limited in its capacity to represent continuous events, which could in part explain why the unfolding of events is temporally compressed in episodic memory.

Eye movements and event segmentation: Eye movements reveal age-related differences in event model updating

People spontaneously segment continuous ongoing actions into sequences of events. Prior research found that gaze similarity and pupil dilation increase at event boundaries and that older adults segment more idiosyncratically than do young adults. We used eye tracking to explore age-related differences in gaze similarity (i.e., the extent to which individuals look at the same places at the same time as others) and pupil dilation at event boundaries. Older and young adults watched naturalistic videos of actors performing everyday activities while we tracked their eye movements. Afterward, they segmented the videos into subevents. Replicating prior work, we found that pupil size and gaze similarity increased at event boundaries. Thus, there were fewer individual differences in eye position at boundaries. We also found that young adults had higher gaze similarity than older adults throughout an entire video and at event boundaries. This study is the first to show that age-related differences in how people parse continuous everyday activities into events may be partially explained by individual differences in gaze patterns. Those who segment less normatively may do so because they fixate less normative regions. Results have implications for future interventions designed to improve encoding in older adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Knowledge-based intervention improves older adult recognition memory for novel activity, but not event segmentation or temporal order memory

Although episodic memory declines with age, older adults are often able to make use of relevant knowledge to support episodic memory. More specifically, prior knowledge may support the perception of meaningful events through the process of event segmentation. We sought to test whether increasing older adults' knowledge for novel activities (i.e., Tai chi, making gyozas) would improve segmentation and memory. We conducted an online, pre-registered intervention in which eighty older adults were recruited based on being novices in each of the targeted activities. Participants completed segmentation and memory tests before and after being randomly assigned to one of two interactive virtual workshops (learning how to practice Tai chi or make gyozas). Each workshop consisted of two one-hour sessions during which an expert provided information about the activity and demonstrated it in a step-by-step fashion. We found that the intervention led to increased learning and recognition memory for the trained activity; however, there were no significant improvements in segmentation behavior, free recall, or memory of sequential information. These findings indicate that either more knowledge training is necessary to affect segmentation, or that segmentation is guided by perceptual features in the environment rather than one's conceptual understanding of the activity.

Adult age differences in event memory updating: The roles of prior-event retrieval and prediction

Remembering past events can lead to predictions of what is to come and to experiencing prediction errors when things change. Previous research has shown enhanced memory updating for ongoing events that are inconsistent with predictions based on past experiences. According to the Event Memory Retrieval and Comparison (EMRC) Theory, such memory updating depends on the encoding of configural representations that bind retrieved features of the previous event, changed features, and the relationship between the two. We investigated potential age-related differences in these mechanisms by showing older and younger adults two movies of everyday activities. Activities in the second movie either repeated from the first movie or included changed endings. During the second movie, before activities ended, participants were instructed to predict the upcoming action based on the first movie. One week later, participants were instructed to recall activity endings from the second movie. For younger adults, having predicted endings consistent with the first movie before seeing changed endings was subsequently associated with better recall of these changed endings and recollection that activities had changed. Conversely, for older adults, making such predictions prior to changes was associated with intruding details from the first movie endings and was less strongly associated with change recollection. Consistent with EMRC, these findings suggest that retrieval of relevant experiences when events change can trigger prediction errors that prompt associative encoding of existing memories and current perceptions. These mechanisms were less efficient in older adults, which may account for their poorer event memory updating than younger adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Measuring event segmentation: An investigation into the stability of event boundary agreement across groups

People spontaneously divide everyday experience into smaller units (event segmentation). To measure event segmentation, studies typically ask participants to explicitly mark the boundaries between events as they watch a movie (segmentation task). Their data may then be used to infer how others are likely to segment the same movie. However, significant variability in performance across individuals could undermine the ability to generalize across groups, especially as more research moves online. To address this concern, we used several widely employed and novel measures to quantify segmentation agreement across different sized groups (n = 2-32) using data collected on different platforms and movie types (in-lab & commercial film vs. online & everyday activities). All measures captured nonrandom and video-specific boundaries, but with notable between-sample variability. Samples of 6-18 participants were required to reliably detect video-driven segmentation behavior within a single sample. As sample size increased, agreement values improved and eventually stabilized at comparable sample sizes for in-lab & commercial film data and online & everyday activities data. Stabilization occurred at smaller sample sizes when measures reflected (1) agreement between two groups versus agreement between an individual and group, and (2) boundary identification between small (fine-grained) rather than large (coarse-grained) events. These analyses inform the tailoring of sample sizes based on the comparison of interest, materials, and data collection platform. In addition to demonstrating the reliability of online and in-lab segmentation performance at moderate sample sizes, this study supports the use of segmentation data to infer when events are likely to be segmented.

Autobiographical event memory and aging: older adults get the gist

We propose that older adults' ability to retrieve episodic autobiographical events, although often viewed through a lens of decline, reveals much about what is preserved and prioritized in cognitive aging. Central to our proposal is the idea that the so-called gist of an autobiographical event is not only spared with normal aging but also well adapted to serve memory-guided behavior in older age. To support our proposal, we review cognitive and brain evidence indicating an age-related shift toward gist memory. We then discuss why this shift likely arises from more than age-related decline and instead partly reflects a natural, arguably adaptive, outcome of experience, motivation, and mode-of-thinking factors. Our proposal reveals an upside of age-related memory changes and identifies important research questions.

Semantic knowledge attenuates age-related differences in event segmentation and episodic memory

While semantic and episodic memory may be distinct memory systems, their interdependence is substantial. For instance, decades of work have shown that semantic knowledge facilitates episodic memory. Here, we aim to clarify this interactive relationship by determining whether semantic knowledge facilitates the acquisition of new episodic memories, in part, by influencing an encoding mechanism, event segmentation. In the current study, we evaluated the extent to which semantic knowledge shapes how people segment ongoing activity and how such knowledge-related benefits in segmentation affect episodic memory performance. To investigate these effects, we combined data across three studies that had young and older adults segment and remember videos of everyday activities that were either familiar or unfamiliar to their age group. We found age-related differences in event-segmentation ability and memory performance, but only when older adults lacked semantic knowledge. Most importantly, when they had access to relevant semantic knowledge, older adults segmented and remembered information similar to young adults. Our findings indicate that older adults can use semantic knowledge to effectively encode and retrieve everyday information. These effects suggest that future interventions can leverage older adults' intact semantic knowledge to attenuate age-related deficits in event segmentation and episodic long-term memory.

Knowledge guides attention to goal-relevant information in older adults

How does viewers’ knowledge guide their attention while they watch everyday events, how does it affect their memory, and does it change with age? Older adults have diminished episodic memory for everyday events, but intact semantic knowledge. Indeed, research suggests that older adults may rely on their semantic memory to offset impairments in episodic memory, and when relevant knowledge is lacking, older adults’ memory can suffer. Yet, the mechanism by which prior knowledge guides attentional selection when watching dynamic activity is unclear. To address this, we studied the influence of knowledge on attention and memory for everyday events in young and older adults by tracking their eyes while they watched videos. The videos depicted activities that older adults perform more frequently than young adults (balancing a checkbook, planting flowers) or activities that young adults perform more frequently than older adults (installing a printer, setting up a video game). Participants completed free recall, recognition, and order memory tests after each video. We found age-related memory deficits when older adults had little knowledge of the activities, but memory did not differ between age groups when older adults had relevant knowledge and experience with the activities. Critically, results showed that knowledge influenced where viewers fixated when watching the videos. Older adults fixated less goal-relevant information compared to young adults when watching young adult activities, but they fixated goal-relevant information similarly to young adults, when watching more older adult activities. Finally, results showed that fixating goal-relevant information predicted free recall of the everyday activities for both age groups. Thus, older adults may use relevant knowledge to more effectively infer the goals of actors, which guides their attention to goal-relevant actions, thus improving their episodic memory for everyday activities.

Influences of domain knowledge on segmentation and memory

Much research has shown that experts possess superior memory in their domain of expertise. This memory benefit has been proposed to be the result of various encoding mechanisms, such as chunking and differentiation. Another potential encoding mechanism that is associated with memory is event segmentation, which is the process by which people parse continuous information into meaningful, discrete units. Previous research has found evidence that segmentation, to some extent, is affected by top-down processing. To date, few studies have investigated the influence of expertise on segmentation, and questions about expertise, segmentation ability, and their impact on memory remain. The goal of the current study was to investigate the influence of expertise on segmentation and memory ability for two different domains: basketball and Overwatch. Participants with high and low knowledge for basketball and with low knowledge for Overwatch viewed and segmented videos at coarse and fine grains, then completed memory tests. Differences in segmentation ability and memory were present between experts and control novices, specifically for the basketball videos; however, experts' segmentation only predicted memory for activities for which knowledge was lacking. Overall, this research suggests that experts' superior memory is not due to their segmentation ability and contributes to a growing body of literature showing evidence supporting conceptual effects on segmentation.

Differential effects of knowledge and aging on the encoding and retrieval of everyday activities

We deconstruct continuous streams of action into smaller, meaningful events. Research has shown that the ability to segment continuous activity into such events and remember their contents declines with age; however, knowledge improves with age. We investigated how young and older adults use knowledge to more efficiently encode and later remember information from everyday events by having participants view a series of self-paced slideshows depicting everyday activities. For some activities, older adults produce more normative scripts than do young adults (older adult activities) and for other activities, young adults produce more normative scripts than do older adults (young adult activities). Overall, participants viewed event boundaries longer than within events (i.e., the event boundary advantage) replicating prior research (e.g., Hard, Recchia, & Tversky, 2011). Importantly, older adults demonstrated the boundary advantage for the older adult activities but not the young adult activities, and they also had better recognition memory for the older adult activities than the young adult activities. We also found that the magnitude of a participant's boundary advantage was associated with better memory, but only for the less knowledgeable activities. Results indicate that older adults use their intact knowledge to better encode and remember everyday activities, but that knowledge and event segmentation may have independent influences on event memory.