The Effects of Aging and Cognitive Strategies on Associative Memory: Not All Associations Are Created Equal

• Main Author: Drouin, Héloïse
• Other Authors: Davidson, Patrick S.R.
• Language: en
• Published: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa 2017
• Subjects: aging; associative memory; strategy; binding
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/36697; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-20977

Young adults often outperform older adults on tests of associative memory, however, the source of this age-related associative memory deficit is still under debate. There are two main non-mutually exclusive hypotheses: 1) impaired binding processes (i.e. creating and retrieving links between units of information) and; 2) impaired strategic processes (i.e. cognitive control processes that support encoding and retrieval). Although both components are thought to contribute uniquely and interact to support associative memory, they have rarely been studied together. The primary goal of this dissertation is to further characterize associative memory deficits in healthy aging by measuring and controlling binding and strategic processes. Specifically, in this series of three experiments, we studied these two components concurrently by varying the level of demands on binding (i.e. comparing memory for different types of associations) and strategic processes (i.e. varying demands on self-initiated processes). A total N of 97 young adults and 94 older adults studied lists of object-pairs and object-location pairs under intentional encoding conditions. Demands on self-initiated processes were manipulated by increasing the number of foils at test (Experiment 1: 4 alternative forced-choice (AFC), vs. Experiment 2 & 3: 20AFC), and by providing strategy instructions in Experiment 3. We measured the production of strategies with trial-by-trial self-report. In all three experiments, we found that young adults outperformed older adults on object-object memory, but not on object-location memory. Older adults were just as proficient as young adults in generating strategies at study. This remained true even when demands on self-initiated processes increased. However, we found in all three experiments that young adults had greater strategy effectiveness (i.e. accuracy on pairs encoded with a strategy) on the object-object test. In contrast, performance on the object-location task was found to be less related to strategies. Our findings suggest that not all associations are equally affected by aging and that even when strategy production is equivalent between age groups older adults can still be impaired on associative memory. The secondary goal of this dissertation was to explore the contribution of individual variability in age, general cognitive functioning, meta-memory and executive functioning on object-object and object-location memory, strategy production, and strategy effectiveness. Our results highlight the important contribution of executive functioning over and above any effects of age in explaining age-related associative memory decline.