Effects of repetition on age differences in associative recognition

Everyday Memory in Healthy Aging: Porous but Not Distorted

Most studies targeting age-association of memory functions report a decline in recognition hits and an increase in false alarms. The goal of the present study was to assess these findings in tasks with day-to-day relevance. We investigated healthy young (YA; age 26.90 ± 3.55 years) and old (OA; age 69.80 ± 5.85 years) adults. Participants were asked to watch six news and six commercials and complete a recognition task relating to the information presented in the videos. OA had a lower hit rate in both news and commercials compared to YA. However, the number of false alarms (FA) was the same in both age groups. Applying signal detection theory, we found age differences in discriminability for both news and commercials paradigm. The groups showed no differences in bias and both chose a liberal answering tendency. We interpret our finding as a result of complex recognition items in an ecologically valid task. Multi-feature items offer an advantage in correct rejection—it is enough to know that at least one feature of an item is false. This benefit does not extend to hits, where all features of an item need to be recognized. This indicates that recognition memory of naturalistic stimuli in OA is porous, but not distorted.

Modeling age differences in effects of pair repetition and proactive interference using a single parameter

In this article, we apply the REM model (Shiffrin & Steyvers, 1997) to age differences in associative memory. Using Criss and Shiffrin's (2005) associative version of REM, we show that in a task with pairs repeated across 2 study lists, older adults' reduced benefit of pair repetition can be produced by a general reduction in the diagnosticity of information stored in memory. This reduction can be modeled similarly well by reducing the overall distinctiveness of memory features, or by reducing the accuracy of memory encoding. We report a new experiment in which pairs are repeated across 3 study lists and extend the model accordingly. Finally, we extend the model to previously reported data using the same task paradigm, in which the use of a high-association strategy introduced proactive interference effects in young adults but not older adults. Reducing the diagnosticity of information in memory also reduces the proactive interference effect. Taken together, the modeling and empirical results reported here are consistent with the claim that some age differences that appear to be specific to associative information can be produced via general degradation of information stored in memory. The REM model provides a useful framework for examining age differences in memory as well as harmonizing seemingly conflicting prior modeling approaches for the associative deficit. (PsycINFO Database Record