Changes in familiarity and recollection across the lifespan: An ERP perspective

Abstract

The ability to recognize previous experience depends on two neurocognitive processes, familiarity, fast-acting and relatively automatic, and recollection, slower-acting and more effortful. Familiarity appears to mature relatively early in development and is maintained with aging, whereas recollection shows protracted development and deteriorates with aging. To assess this model, ERP and behavioral data were recorded in children (9-10 years), adolescents (13-14), young (20-30) and older (65-85) adults during a recognition memory task in which the same items were studied and tested over four cycles. Participants decided whether each item was old or new and then whether the decision was associated with (Remember, R) or without (Know, K) contextual detail. Memory sensitivity was greatest in young adults, although all groups showed increases in memory sensitivity and R judgments with repetition. Familiarity-based processes (mid-frontal episodic memory, EM, effect) appeared to be used by adolescents, young and older adults, but apparently not to the same extent by children. Recollection-based processes (parietal EM effect) were recruited by children, adolescents and young adults, but to a much lesser extent by older adults. Repetition enhanced the parietal effect in all but older adults. However, post-hoc analyses indicated that reduced recollective processing was confined to poor-performing older adults. By contrast, children appeared to rely mainly on recollection concordant with their conservative decision criteria across tests. We conclude that episodic-memory development reflects the increasingly flexible and interchangeable use of familiarity and recollection with a breakdown in the latter at older ages, perhaps limited to poor-performing older adults.

Characterising neural signatures of successful aging: Electrophysiological correlates of preserved episodic memory in older age

“…Research dissecting the heterogeneity of older adults according to high and low cognitive performance has been valuable for examining associated neural mechanisms underlying variation in function (Daselaar, Veltman, Rombouts, Raaijmakers, & Jonker, 2003;De Sanctis, Gomez-Ramirez, Sehatpour, Wylie, & Foxe, 2009;Friedman, de Chastelaine, Nessler, & Malcolm, 2010;Wiegand et al, 2014;Wolk et al, 2009). Nevertheless, differentiating individual differences in performance, based on the same dependent variable that is used to measure this performance, increases the statistical risk of regression towards the mean when attempting to divide subtypes of elderly.…”

“…Such effects are consistent with dual-process models of recognition (Mandler, 1980;Yonelinas, 2002) that dissociate the feeling that an item has been experienced before (familiarity) from a detailed explicit memory of the event (recollection). Research has explored individual differences by categorising elderly samples into high and low performers (Friedman et al, 2010;Wolk et al, 2009) and have found preservation in recollection-based processing associated with parietal effects in the high performers and young but the absence of this parietal modulation in older low performers.…”

Hippocampal maturity promotes memory distinctiveness in childhood and adolescence

“…Developmental findings from animal models (13) and initial evidence from human studies (14) suggest that the DG matures later than other HC subfields. Likewise, memory functions associated with pattern separation, such as recollection (6), show a protracted course of development that extends well into middle childhood (15). Thus, the DG is a candidate region of interest (ROI) for investigating developmental associations between HC and pattern separation.…”

Parlez-vous français? Episodic and Semantic Feeling of Knowing in Aging

“…The relationship between recollective experience and FOK accuracy is especially important regarding aging, where both subjective measures (e.g. Remember/Know: Bugaiska et al, 2007;Friedman et al, 2010) and objective measures (e.g. source memory tasks: Henkel et al, 1998;Thomas et al, 2011) indicate a recollective deficit in older adults.…”