Aging and Encoding in Memory: False Alarms and Decision Criteria in a Word-Pair Recognition Task

Abstract

Employing a false alarm recognition procedure with learning of highly associated word pairs, an experiment was conducted to examine the hypothesis of an age-related deficit in the distinctiveness of encoding. The evolution of the false alarm rate and of the C decision criteria was observed across three age groups, young adults, older adults, and older-older adults. The results show 1) no age differences on C decision criteria, indicating that the increase in FA with age is not related to a subject compensation strategy but is probably due to a failure in memory strength, and 2) that older respondents produced significantly more false alarms to distractors related to target items than the young respondents did but that they did not differ in their false alarm rate for unrelated distractors. This finding is interpreted as supporting the hypothesis of a failure with age to encode target items in a sufficiently elaborate or distinctive fashion. For the older-older respondents the data showed an increase in all false alarms indexes, suggesting that the encoding deficit gets worse in late adulthood.

Memory Conjunction Errors in Younger and Older Adults: Event-Related Potential and Neuropsychological Data

“…This result supports the idea that the hippocampal formation plays a vital role in the binding of individual stimulus components into an integrated whole (Kroll et al, 1996). A handful of studies suggest that reduced recognition accuracy within normal elderly samples is due more to inflated false alarm rates than to depressed hit rates (Chao & Knight, 1997;Flicker, Ferris, Crook, & Bartus, 1989;Fulton & Bartlett, 1991;Isingrini, Fontaine, Taconnat, & Duportal, 1995;. Kroll et al's results might then suggest that high false alarm rates among the elderly should be attributed to age-related dysfunction of the medial temporal lobe.…”

Less Effort, Better Results: How Does Music Act on Prefrontal Cortex in Older Adults during Verbal Encoding? An fNIRS Study

“…This effect has been conceptualized in terms of a model called the hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults (HAROLD) (Cabeza, 2002), and may be due to dedifferentiation of function, deficits in function, or functional reorganization and compensation in frontal lobe regions (Rajah and D’Esposito, 2005). In line with the idea of an age-related memory encoding deficit, several neuroimaging findings confirm episodic memory impairments linked to reduced recruitment of mediotemporal and PFC regions, mainly during the encoding phase of memory tasks (Daselaar et al, 2004; Dennis et al, 2008), supporting the hypothesis that older adults fail to encode target items thoroughly (Craik and Lockhart, 1972; Burke and Light, 1981; Isingrini et al, 1995). …”

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