Face–name learning in older adults: a benefit of hyper-binding

Abstract

Difficulty remembering faces and corresponding names is a hallmark of cognitive aging, as is increased susceptibility to distraction. Given evidence that older adults spontaneously encode relationships between target pictures and simultaneously occurring distractors (a hyper-binding phenomenon), we asked whether memory for face-name pairs could be improved through prior exposure to faces presented with distractor names. In three experiments, young and older adults performed a selective attention task on faces while ignoring superimposed names. After a delay, they learned and were tested on face-name pairs that were either maintained or rearranged from the initial task but were not told of the connection between tasks. In each experiment, older but not younger participants showed better memory for maintained than for rearranged pairs, indicating that older adults' natural propensity to tacitly encode and bind relevant and irrelevant information can be employed to aid face-name memory performance.

An Incidental Learning Method to Improve Face-Name Memory in Older Adults With Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment

“…Younger adults did not benefit from this approach, that is, their recall and associative recognition performance were the same regardless of whether pairs had repeated. In combination with evidence that older adults hyper-bind and implicitly access prior knowledge of distraction (Campbell et al, 2010;Rowe et al, 2006;Weeks et al, 2016), this work suggests that broadened attention toward distraction in older, but not younger adults, allowed older adults to incidentally rehearse face-name associations and retain them across a delay.…”

“…They have also been shown to spontaneously bind co-occurring target and distracting information and implicitly access this information to aid subsequently memory (Campbell, Hasher, & Thomas, 2010;Campbell & Hasher, 2018). Although the original associative binding work reporting this finding was done with irrelevant words superimposed on pictures relevant on a 1-back task, similar spontaneous binding by older adults has also been reported for distracting names superimposed on target faces (Weeks, Biss, Murphy, & Hasher, 2016).…”

“…Results suggest that, like healthy older adults (Biss et al, 2013;Campbell et al, 2010;Rowe et al, 2006;Weeks et al, 2016), people with aMCI can benefit from conditions that encourage stimulus-driven processing to cue incidental rehearsal. It is unclear whether broadened attention to distraction was specifically responsible for the mnemonic benefit because an experimental condition in which faces were repeated in the 1-back task without the paired distracting names was not included.…”

Divided attention reduces resistance to distraction at encoding but not retrieval

“…One of the goals of this research is to characterize the mechanism of the distraction transfer effect that has been shown to benefit memory in older adults (e.g. Amer & Hasher, 2014;Rowe et al, 2006;Weeks et al, 2016). The presence of significant priming for distraction in the DA at Encoding conditions confirms that lack of efficient control over distraction is an important component of this effect.…”

“…In one study, young and older participants performed a selective attention task on pictures, ignoring superimposed distracter words, and older adults outperformed young adults on a subsequent word fragment completion task in which previous distracter words served as solutions to some fragments (Rowe et al, 2006). Older adults' implicit knowledge of distraction has now been shown to transfer to a variety of other test tasks including cued recall (Campbell, Hasher, & Thomas, 2010;Weeks, Biss, Murphy, & Hasher, 2016), prospective memory (Lourenço & Maylor, 2015), and free recall (Biss, Ngo, Hasher, Campbell, & Rowe, 2013), all without participants reporting any awareness of the relevance of the distracters. It is currently unclear whether the observed tacit transfer of distraction to later tasks is related to a lack of attentional control at encoding, retrieval, or both.…”