Age Differences in Memory for Concrete and Abstract Pictures

Abstract

There is considerable experimental literature showing that memory for complex pictures is relatively insensitive to age. Previous research has shown that young and old adults do not differ in their ability to recognize complex scenes. Other studies, however, using simple line drawings, do find age differences. This experiment investigated the possibility that the failure to find age differences with memory for complex pictures occurs because of memory support provided at encoding and retrieval by both the degree of visual detail (complex perceptual information) and the degree of propositional content (linguistic meaningfulness) that are represented in complex scenes. Pictures were shown to young and old subjects that differed in visual detail (complex vs simple) and propositional content (concrete vs abstract). The results indicated that age differences in picture memory emerge if the pictures are either deprived of visual detail or reduced in propositional content.

Aging and the Neural Correlates of Successful Picture Encoding: Frontal Activations Compensate for Decreased Medial-Temporal Activity

“…In past subsequent memory studies, there have been difficulties in acquiring sufficient numbers of ''forgotten'' items (e.g., ''misses'' where a subject says a presented item was not studied) to have sufficient power to make contrasts between remembered and forgotten items (Daselaar, Veltman, Rombouts, Lazeron, et al, 2003;. In the present study, photographs of outdoor scenes were used as targets and based on past work, recognition lures were created that resulted in equivalent numbers of remembered and forgotten items for both age groups (Park, Welsh, et al, 2003;Smith, Park, Cherry, & Berkovsky, 1990;Park, Puglisi, Smith, & Dudley, 1987;Park, Puglisi, & Smith, 1986) while simultaneously avoiding very low ''miss'' rates. This resulted in sufficient power to subtract forgotten from remembered items for both old and young adults.…”

Age and culture modulate object processing and object-scene binding in the ventral visual area

“…There is considerable evidence that older adults buttress their memory for complex pictures by using contextual information when it is present in pictures that are sufficiently rich in meaning and detail (Park, Puglisi, & Smith, 1986;Park, Smith, Morrell, Puglisi, & Dudley, 1990;Smith, Park, Cherry, & Berkovsky, 1990). It is possible that further exploration of neural processing of context will demonstrate age differences in this mechanism in cases in which the contextual information is less meaningful or more poorly integrated with the target.…”

“…It is possible that further exploration of neural processing of context will demonstrate age differences in this mechanism in cases in which the contextual information is less meaningful or more poorly integrated with the target. In particular, a large number of findings suggests that older adults remember contextual information associated with words or abstract pictures less well than young adults do Smith et al, 1990). It may also be that pronounced cultural differences in the neural processing of background information will similarly emerge under more demanding conditions, accentuating the expected bias for East Asian cultural groups to show a preferential processing of background detail relative to Western groups.…”

Working Memory for Complex Scenes: Age Differences in Frontal and Hippocampal Activations

“…We focus in the present study on the role of the hippocampus in the processing of scenes in working memory, as a method for elucidating the role of the hippocampus. On one hand, older adults would appear to be efficient at relational processing, given extensive evidence that immediate recognition of complex, meaningful scenes is age-invariant (Smith, Park, Cherry, & Berkovsky, 1990;Park, Puglisi, & Smith, 1986). These data would suggest equivalent activation of hippocampal structures in processing meaningful scenes between old and young.…”

“…We chose to study complex pictures because there is a wealth of behavioral data suggesting that older adults show preserved function relative to younger adults in encoding and immediate memory for complex, meaningful pictures (Smith et al, 1990;Park et al, 1986;Park, Puglisi, Smith, & Dudley, 1987). Equivalent, nonceiling behavioral performance on a task between age groups provides ideal conditions for the interpretation of age-differences in neural activations (Park, Polk, Mikels, Taylor, & Marshuetz, 2001;Reuter-Lorenz, Marshuetz, Jonides, & Smith, 2001;Grady, 1998;Cabeza et al, 1997), and we believed the use of meaningful pictures would provide this solid behavioral foundation for the imaging work.…”