Auditory and visual memory losses in aging populations

Tactile memory impairments in younger and older adults

Human tactile memory allows us to remember and retrieve the multitude of somatosensory experiences we undergo in everyday life. An unsolved question is how tactile memory mechanisms change with increasing age. We here use the ability to remember fine-grained tactile patterns passively presented to the fingertip to investigate age-related changes in tactile memory performance. In experiment 1, we varied the degree of similarity between one learned and several new tactile patterns to test on age-related changes in the "uniqueness" of a stored tactile memory trace. In experiment 2, we varied the degree of stimulus completeness of both known and new tactile patterns to test on age-related changes in the weighting between known and novel tactile information. Results reveal that older adults show only weak impairments in both precision and bias of tactile memories, however, they show specific deficits in reaching peak performance > 85% in both experiments. In addition, both younger and older adults show a pattern completion bias for touch, indicating a higher weighting of known compared to new information. These results allow us to develop new models on how younger and older adults store and recall tactile experiences of the past, and how this influences their everyday behavior.

Method of presentation of meaningful prose to young and old adults

Thirty young (x = 27.5 years) and thirty old (x = 67.7 years) volunteers read a selection of prose and then were tested for retention with a fifteen item multiple-choice comprehension test. Half the subjects in each group were in the standard visual condition and read the passage silently while the rest read the material aloud to obtain a simultaneous auditory-visual input. There were no age-related differences in the time taken to read the materials and, for both age groups, reading aloud required significantly more time than silent reading. Although the young subjects had significantly higher scores than old on the comprehension test, neither age group exhibited any differences attributable to mode of presentation of materials.