Age-related changes in associative memory for emotional and nonemotional integrative representations.

Abstract

Events often include novel combinations of items. Sometimes, through the process of integration, we experience and remember these items as parts of a whole rather than as separate entities. Recent research with younger adults has demonstrated that successfully integrating two non-emotional items at encoding, instead of imagining them separately, produces a disproportionately larger associative memory benefit than integrating an emotional and a non-emotional item (Murray & Kensinger, 2012). In the first study to examine whether age and emotion interact to influence integration, we use two measures of integrative success – the ability to successfully retrieve integrations, measured through associative cued recall, and the ability to successfully generate integrated representations at encoding, measured through self report. The cued recall results (Expt. 1 and 2) reveal that the emotional content of the word pairs interacts to influence the effect of integration on older adults’ associative memory, but in the opposite direction of younger adults: Older adults show no associative retrieval benefit of integration over non-integration for non-emotional pairs, but they show a significant integrative benefit for emotional pairs. We also demonstrate (Expt. 2) that encoding time interacts with emotion and integration in different ways for older and younger adults: Putting younger adults under time pressure reduces their success in generating integrated representations at encoding for non-emotional pairs, whereas for older adults it disrupts their ability to generate integrated representations for emotional pairs. We discuss possible age-related differences in the processes used to create emotional and non-emotional integrations.

Expanding and retracting from the self: Gains and costs in switching self-associations.

“…Indeed, brain imaging indicates that the hippocampal structures that discriminate reward are also involved in binding associations in memory ( Wolosin, Zeithamova, & Preston, 2012 , 2013 ). Similarly, there is evidence that positive emotion can enhance integrative associative memory ( Murray & Kensinger, 2013 , 2014 ). Thus, both reward and emotion are candidate “drivers” for the binding effects we observe in relation to the self.…”

Memory for positive, negative and neutral events in younger and older adults: Does emotion influence binding in event memory?

“…Murray and Kensinger (2013) found that an encoding task that encouraged participants to form a single image that integrated two words in a pair enhanced older adults’ associative memory for positive and negative word pairs but not non-emotional word pairs. For younger adults, on the other hand, the picture integration task enhanced the cued recall of non-emotional words more than emotional words.…”

I remember it like it was yesterday: Age-related differences in the subjective experience of remembering

“…Older adults also produce vividness ratings that are as high as young adults when they imagine familiar places (Robin & Moscovitch, 2017). Critically, older adults report subjective vividness levels that are as high as young adults when they fill-in mental imagery questionnaires Murray & Kensinger, 2013;Pierce & Storandt, 1987;Uittenhove et al, 2015). However, whether these judgements reflect the richness of the content of what older participants have in mind has been questioned (Pierce & Storandt, 1987), but not examined yet.…”