Decoding selective attention to context memory: An aging study

Abstract

Emerging evidence has suggested that the tendency for older adults to bind too much contextual information during encoding (i.e., hyper-binding) may contribute to poorer memory for relevant contextual information during retrieval. While these findings are consistent with theories of age-related declines in selective attention and inhibitory control, the degree to which older adults are able to selectively attend to relevant contextual information during encoding is unknown. To better understand the neural dynamics associated with selective attention during encoding, the current study applied multivariate pattern analyses (MVPA) to oscillatory EEG in order to track moment-to-moment shifts of attention between relevant and irrelevant contextual information during encoding. Young and older adults studied pictures of objects in the presence of two contextual features: a color and a scene, and their attention was directed to the object's relationship with one of those contexts (i.e., target context). Results showed that patterns of oscillatory power successfully predicted whether selective attention was directed to a scene or color, across age groups. Individual differences in overall classification performance were associated with individual differences in target context memory accuracy during retrieval. However, changes in classification performance within a trial, suggestive of fluctuations in selective attention, predicted individual differences in hyper-binding. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to use MPVA techniques to decode attention during episodic encoding and the impact of attentional shifts toward distracting information on age-related context memory impairments and hyper-binding. These results are consistent with the as-of-yet unsubstantiated theory that age-related declines in context memory may be attributable to poorer selective attention and/or greater inhibitory deficits in older adults.

Context-dependent extinction of threat memories: influences of healthy aging

“…Thus, we tentatively suggest that age-related declines in the efficiency of selective attention, possible due to a age-related reduction in available processing resources 72 , may lead to weak representation of contextual information and reduced ability to encode the appropriate CS-context relationship, thus promoting overgeneralization of threat responses to many contexts in older adults. These results are consistent with emerging theories that age-related declines in processing contextual information are attributable to poorer selective attention and/or greater inhibitory deficits in older adults 73 . Additional research is certainly still warranted, however, that directly examines the relationship between selective attention and context dependency of extinction in young and older adults.…”

Context Memory Encoding and Retrieval Temporal Dynamics are Modulated by Attention across the Adult Lifespan

“…Data from one young adult (21 years) were excluded because of noisy EEG. A subset of the young and older, but not middle-aged, adults' data were included in prior published studies examining different research questions (James et al, 2016b;Strunk et al, 2017;Powell et al, 2018). All subjects were native English speakers and had normal or corrected vision.…”

“…However, if attention modulates these dynamics, we predict that the fit to either the attention or hybrid models will be reduced with age; as the ability to selectively attend to task-relevant features is reduced with age (Hasher and Zacks, 1988;Campbell et al, 2010). Any attention modulation on the temporal dynamics should be reduced, potentially contributing to age-related context memory impairments (James et al, 2016a;Powell et al, 2018).…”

Spontaneous Distractor Reactivation With Age: Evidence for Bound Target-Distractor Representations in Memory

“…There is also evidence that older adults not only encode distraction but also simultaneously bind it to co-occurring targets (Campbell & Hasher, 2018; Campbell, Hasher, & Thomas, 2010; Powell, Strunk, James, Polyn, & Duarte, 2018; Schmitz, Cheng, & De Rosa, 2010). For example, after performing a one-back task on pictures with superimposed distractor words (i.e., indicate whether two pictures in a row are identical), older, but not younger, adults show an advantage on a subsequent picture-word paired-associates task when the pairs are preserved from the one-back task.…”