Age differences in the precision of memory at short and long delays.

Rhodes, Stephen; Abbene, Emily E.; Meierhofer, Ashley M.; Naveh–Benjamin, Moshe

doi:10.1037/pag0000565

Cited by 18 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 106 publications

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“…Yet remembering whether an item had been previously seen (e.g., “Did I see this red apple, or was it a green apple?”) only captures one aspect of memory, and episodic memory is more multifaceted as it also contains information about where and when an item was encountered (Tulving, 1983). It is less clear how much specific information older adults can remember for more complex episodic memories, though some emerging evidence suggests that older adults may remember episodes at a less precise degree of representation (Greene & Naveh-Benjamin, 2020b; Rhodes et al, 2020).…”

Section: Age-related Differences Across Levels Of Specificity In Epis...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Levels of specificity in episodic memory: Insights from response accuracy and subjective confidence ratings in older adults and in younger adults under full or divided attention.

Greene¹,

Chism²,

Naveh–Benjamin³

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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We propose that the specificity with which associations in episodic memory can be remembered varies on a continuum. In Experiment 1, we provide further evidence that older adults' deficits in associative memory scale with the amount of specificity that needs to be retrieved. In Experiment 2, we address whether depleted attentional resources, simulated in young adults under divided attention at encoding, could account for older adults' associative memory specificity deficits. Participants studied face-scene pairs and later completed an associative recognition test, with test pairs that were old, highly similar or less similar to old pairs, or completely dissimilar. Participants rated their confidence in their decisions. False positive recognition responses increased with the amount of specificity needed to be retrieved. Whereas older adults' associative memory deficits scaled with how much specific information needed to be remembered, younger adults under divided attention had a more general deficit in associative memory. Confidence-accuracy analysis showed that participants were best able to calibrate their confidence when less specific information was needed to perform well. While divided attention young adults were generally prone to high-confidence errors, older adults' high-confidence errors were most apparent when highly specific information needed to be remembered. These results provide further evidence for levels of specificity in episodic memory. Access to the most specific levels is most vulnerable to forgetting, in line with a specificity principle of memory (Surprenant & Neath, 2009). Further, depleted attentional resources at encoding cannot entirely explain older adults' associative memory specificity deficits.

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Section: Age-related Differences Across Levels Of Specificity In Epis...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Levels of specificity in episodic memory: Insights from response accuracy and subjective confidence ratings in older adults and in younger adults under full or divided attention.

Greene¹,

Chism²,

Naveh–Benjamin³

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Self Cite

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“…Alternatively, the observed age-related decline in precision might not be related to the initial encoding of visual information, but to the declined ability in retrieving memory items (Rhodes et al, 2020). In particular, for older adults, once the encoded memory colors in VWM were not highly accessible anymore after a two-second delay period, the precision of VWM items might have decayed substantially.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Cognitive aging and categorical representations in visual working memory

Zhou

Lorist

2022

Preprint

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A traditional view on cognitive aging is that visual working memory (VWM) capacity declines in older adults. Recent work has shown that visual information can be stored in VWM in different forms of representations. Specifically, VWM becomes more reliant on categorical representations as compared to continuous representations as memory load increases. Here, we replicated these findings and tested whether this holds for older adults. Participants memorized one to four colors; after a delay, an arrow pointed at the location of the color that needed to be reported. We used an extended mixture model to examine the extent to which memory responses were biased in the direction of the category prototypes. Our results showed that for both younger and older adults, VWM became more biased towards category prototypes with increasing memory load. Importantly, we found no difference in the extent to which VWM was biased towards category prototypes between younger and older adults. However, older adults showed an overall lower precision as compared to younger adults. Taken together, our results demonstrated that both younger and older adults became more reliant on categorical representations with increasing memory load; importantly, the extent to which categorical representations were involved in maintaining VWM information was insensitive to age.

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“…Put another way, if each face feature is represented by a distribution of potentially remembered values, repulsion would reflect a shift in this distribution whereas precision would reflect reduced variance in this distribution (Yu & Geng, 2019 ). This is a key point because prior measures of memory precision have often assumed a distribution centered around the actual (veridical) memory value (e.g., Brady et al, 2013 ; Cooper & Ritchey, 2019 ; Harlow & Donaldson, 2013 ; Harlow & Yonelinas, 2016 ; Nilakantan et al, 2017 ; Nilakantan et al, 2018 ; Rhodes et al, 2020 ; Richter et al, 2016 ). While this is a reasonable assumption in many contexts, the current findings provide clear evidence, in the context of memory interference, that this assumption is violated.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, calculating precision requires that individual memories be sampled multiple times (to observe variability in the response). Despite recent progress towards utilizing continuous feature measures in episodic memory research (e.g., Berens et al, 2020 ; Brady et al, 2013 ; Cooper et al, 2019 ; Cooper & Ritchey, 2019 ; Harlow & Donaldson, 2013 ; Harlow & Yonelinas, 2016 ; Nilakantan et al, 2017 ; Nilakantan et al, 2018 ; Rhodes et al, 2020 ; Richter et al, 2016 ), prior studies have not specifically compared the relative contributions of precision and bias to the resolution of episodic memory interference.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term memory interference is resolved via repulsion and precision along diagnostic memory dimensions

Drascher

Kuhl

2022

Psychon Bull Rev

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When memories share similar features, this can lead to interference, and ultimately forgetting. With experience, however, interference can be resolved. This raises the important question of how memories change, with experience, to minimize interference. Intuitively, interference might be minimized by increasing the precision and accuracy of memories. However, recent evidence suggests a potentially adaptive role for memory distortions. Namely, similarity can trigger exaggerations of subtle differences between memories (repulsion). Here, we tested whether repulsion specifically occurs on feature dimensions along which memories compete and whether repulsion is predictive of reduced memory interference. To test these ideas, we developed synthetic faces in a two-dimensional face space (affect and gender). This allowed us to precisely manipulate similarity between faces and the feature dimension along which faces differed. In three experiments, participants learned to associate faces with unique cue words. Associative memory tests confirmed that when faces were similar (face pairmates), this produced interference. Using a continuous face reconstruction task, we found two changes in face memory that preferentially occurred along the feature dimension that was “diagnostic” of the difference between face pairmates: (1) there was a bias to remember pairmates with exaggerated differences (repulsion) and (2) there was an increase in the precision of feature memory. Critically, repulsion and precision were each associated with reduced associative memory interference, but these were statistically dissociable contributions. Collectively, our findings reveal that similarity between memories triggers dissociable, experience-dependent changes that serve an adaptive role in reducing interference.

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Age differences in the precision of memory at short and long delays.

Cited by 18 publications

References 106 publications

Levels of specificity in episodic memory: Insights from response accuracy and subjective confidence ratings in older adults and in younger adults under full or divided attention.

Levels of specificity in episodic memory: Insights from response accuracy and subjective confidence ratings in older adults and in younger adults under full or divided attention.

Cognitive aging and categorical representations in visual working memory

Long-term memory interference is resolved via repulsion and precision along diagnostic memory dimensions

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