Associative and strategic components of episodic memory: A life-span dissociation.

Abstract

The authors investigated the strategic component (i.e., elaboration and organization of episodic features) and the associative component (i.e., binding processes) of episodic memory and their interactions in 4 age groups (10 -12, 13-15, 20 -25, and 70 -75 years of age). On the basis of behavioral and neural evidence, the authors hypothesized that the two components are functionally related but follow different life-span gradients. In a fully crossed design, age differences in recognition memory for single words versus word pairs (associative demand manipulation) were examined under instructions that emphasized item, pair, or elaborative-pair encoding (strategy manipulation). As predicted, the results showed that the strategic and associative components follow different life-span trajectories. Relative to younger adults, children's difficulties in episodic memory primarily reflected lower levels of strategic functioning. In contrast, older adults showed impairments in both strategic and associative components. The authors conclude that the comparison of strategic and associative components of episodic memory across the life span helps to delineate the two components' unique and interactive contributions to episodic memory performance.

Dopamine and glutamate receptor genes interactively influence episodic memory in old age

“…Older carriers of genotypes associated with higher hippocampal D2 receptor densities (the DRD2 C/C genotype) and greater NMDA efficacy (the NR3A T/T genotype) showed reduced age-related episodic memory deficits relative to the other genotype groups. Notably, advantageous effects of the two genes were also present in more demanding associative memory conditions, in which older adults showed stronger impairments corroborating the wellestablished associative-memory deficit in aging (e.g., NavehBenjamin, 2000;Shing et al, 2008). In younger adults, genetic effects did not differ reliably from zero and were reliably smaller than in older adults.…”

Differences in binding and monitoring mechanisms contribute to lifespan age differences in false memory.

“…Of note, while older adults showed little or no change in high-confidence errors to rearranged pairs across runs, children decreased their highconfidence errors and did not differ from younger adults in the second and third runs of the task (see Figure 3C). These results suggest that when given the possibility to repeatedly encode the pairs across runs, children were able to make use of a relatively well functioning binding (Shing et al, 2008;Sluzenski, Newcombe, & Kovacs, 2006) to build distinctive representations of which two words belong to a lure pair and use them to correctly reject new rearrangements and calibrate subjective confidence. Crucially, as predicted by the twocomponent framework, no such changes were observed for older adults.…”

“…The word pairs were taken from a previous study on lifespan age differences in episodic memory (Shing et al, 2008) and five independent raters checked that the words constituting a pair were not phonetically, categorically or semantically related. The words were comparable on word frequency and length.…”

Individual differences in criterion-based dropout learning in old age: the role of processing speed and verbal knowledge

“…According to the associative binding approach (NavehBenjamin 2000; Shing et al 2008), older persons show, on average, a disadvantage with regard to paired-associative learning. The present study showed that there are individual differences in paired-associative learning implying that some persons in old age may have bigger associative binding difficulties than others.…”