Cognitive aging
Can familiarity with a task erase older adults' memory gap?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Older adults looked at the important actions and remembered them as well as young adults when they watched familiar activities, but fell behind on unfamiliar ones.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Mixed design: young vs. older adults (between groups) each watched four silent videos of everyday activities, two more familiar to older adults and two more familiar to young adults (within subjects), with eye tracking and later memory tests
- N
- N=63 · 63 participants (33 young, 30 older adults); three older and two young adults who could not be calibrated were dropped from the eye-tracking analyses only
- Population
- Young adult university students and healthy, community-dwelling older adults screened for dementia in Kansas, USA
- Outcome
- Proportion of viewing time on goal-relevant areas of interest; composite event memory from free recall, recognition and order tests
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Key findings
When watching the young adults' activities, older adults spent less time on the goal-relevant objects than young adults did (proportions of about 0.33 vs. 0.37), but on the older adults' activities the two groups were identical (both about 0.42). Memory followed the same pattern: young adults remembered the young-adult activities almost one standard deviation better, yet the age difference on the older-adult activities was not significant. In exploratory analyses, people of both ages who performed an activity often looked more at goal-relevant information and remembered it better, and more looking at goal-relevant objects predicted better free recall, though not recognition or order memory.
Methodology
Young and older adults watched four silent videos of an actor doing everyday tasks while an eye tracker recorded where they looked. Two tasks, balancing a checkbook and planting flowers, were chosen through pilot studies as more familiar to older adults, and two, setting up a video game console and installing a printer, as more familiar to young adults. The researchers marked the object relevant to the actor's current goal in every frame and measured how much viewing time fell on it. After each video and a short distractor task, participants recalled the activity and completed picture-recognition and order-memory tests.
Limitations
Only four videos were used, and two of them (printer and flowers) turned out to be fairly familiar to both groups, so much of the effect rests on the checkbook and game-console videos. Familiarity was not randomly assigned but came with age and life experience, so other differences between the activities could contribute. The study cannot tell whether knowledge actually boosted older adults' memory up to young adults' level or whether the older-adult tasks were simply less sensitive to age differences. All actors were young, which may have affected older viewers, and the link between gaze and memory is correlational.
How this study connects
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