Cognitive aging
Why do some older adults confuse similar memories more than others?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Among healthy older adults, how well they could tell apart very similar pictures predicted memory when the old and new items were shown side by side, while executive function predicted memory when items were shown one at a time.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Young vs. older group comparison plus regression, mixed-model and dominance analyses of individual differences within older adults; recognition test format (forced choice vs. yes/no) varied within subjects
- N
- N=124 · 124 cognitively unimpaired older adults for the individual-differences analyses; 52 younger adults added for age-group comparisons (only 34 of them completed the full neuropsychological battery)
- Population
- Community-dwelling older adults aged 60-87 and younger adults aged 18-35 in Cambridge, UK
- Outcome
- Recognition memory discriminability (d') for studied objects versus highly similar lures in forced-choice and yes/no formats
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Key findings
Older adults did worse than younger adults in both memory formats, everyone did better in forced choice, and the age deficit in the yes/no test came from more false alarms to lures rather than fewer hits. Older adults were also worse at discriminating highly similar objects and scenes. Within older adults, perceptual discrimination improved prediction of forced-choice memory while executive function did not, and executive function improved prediction of yes/no memory while perceptual discrimination did not; a three-way interaction and dominance analysis confirmed this double dissociation. Executive function was related to correctly rejecting lures but not to hits or response bias.
Methodology
Younger and older adults studied 200 object pictures and were then tested with highly similar lure versions, either side by side with the original (forced choice) or one at a time with a yes/no judgment. They also did 'oddity' tasks, picking the odd one out among three very similar novel objects or scenes, and standard tests of working memory, task switching (Trails B) and verbal fluency, which were combined into an executive-function composite. Within the older group, regression, mixed models and dominance analysis tested which ability best explained each memory format.
Limitations
This is correlational, cross-sectional data, so it shows which abilities go together with memory, not that improving executive function or perception would improve memory. The sample size was set by feasibility rather than a power analysis, and the effects explained only modest amounts of variance. The authors did not record which retrieval strategies people used, so the recall-to-reject explanation is inferred, and neither the memory formats nor the oddity task is 'process pure'. Results used an old/new response format and may not transfer to the common old/similar/new version of these tasks.
How this study connects
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