Same face, same place, different memory: manner of presentation modulates the associative deficit in older adults

Abstract

One of the more severe and consequential memory impairments experienced by older adults is the loss of the ability to form and remember associations. Although the associative deficit is often assumed to be unitary, memory episodes may contain different types of associations (e.g., item-item, item-context). Research in younger adults suggests that these different association types may involve different neural mechanisms. This raises the possibility that different association types are not equally affected by aging. In order to investigate this, the current study directly compared memory across item-item and item-context associations in younger and older adults by manipulating the manner of presentation of the associations. Results indicate that the associative deficit in aging is not uniform and that aging has a greater impact on item-context compared to item-item associations. The results have implications for theories of associative memory, age-related cognitive decline, and the functional organization of the medial temporal lobe in aging.

Understanding associative false memories in aging using multivariate analyses

“…The results highlight the strength of configural arrangements as part of the associative memory trace and the importance of maintaining configural congruency across memory phases as a means to bolster the transfer of associative information across phases in older adults. This finding is consistent with earlier behavioral work from our collaborative group (Overman, Dennis, McCormick-Huhn, Steinsiek, & Cesar, 2019; Overman et al, 2018) where we found that both the manner of encoding presentation as well as congruency of configural display was critical to memory success. Importantly, the current results suggest that the strength of this representation is preserved across the adult lifespan.…”