Developmental change in proactive interference across the life span: Evidence from two working memory tasks.

Abstract

Working memory (WM) as the ability to temporarily maintain and manipulate various kinds of information is known to be affected by proactive interference (PI) from previously relevant contents, but studies on developmental changes in the susceptibility to PI are scarce. In the present study, we investigated life span development of item-specific PI. To this end, 92 individuals between the ages of 8 and 74 years completed a recent-probes task and an n-back task that both composed experimental manipulations of PI. Regarding global WM development, young adults had higher WM performance than children and older adults in both tasks. Significant PI × Age interactions revealed that susceptibility to PI changed over the life span in both tasks, whereas the developmental course of PI differed between the tasks: Children committed more PI-related errors than young adults in the recent-probes task but showed marginally less PI in the n-back task. Regarding reaction time costs, children did not differ from adults in the recent-probes task and were less affected than adults in the n-back. Older adults showed more PI-related errors than young adults in both tasks. Therefore, as expected, item-specific PI changed over the life span with the young adults being less susceptible to PI than children and older adults. The diverging developmental effects of PI across both tasks, especially in the children, are supposed to reflect different causes for the difficulties regarding resisting PI in children and older adults. These might concern differently developed underlying cognitive processes such as inhibition or recollection, or different responses to task demands across both tasks.

Training of resistance to proactive interference and working memory in older adults: a randomized double-blind study

“…Recent-probes task: The recent-probes task (cf. Monsell, 1978) has previously been used to assess PI-processes within WM (see Jonides and Nee, 2006;Unsworth, 2010) and was adapted from Loosli et al (2014). Twelve animal pictures (non-colored line drawings) from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart object collection (Snodgrass and Vanderwart, 1980) were used as stimuli (see Figure 1A).…”

“…N-back task: The visual two-back task was adapted from Loosli et al (2014). Twelve pictures of daily objects (non-colored line-drawings, from Cycowicz et al, 1997; see also Snodgrass and Vanderwart, 1980) were used as stimuli (see Figure 1B).…”

“…There were four conditions, the recent-negative condition elicited PI (cf. Loosli et al, 2014). In the n-back (B), participants had to press the left button if the present object was the same as two positions before; else, the right button had to be pressed.…”

“…In particular, older adults have been found to be more susceptible to PI in different WM tasks compared to younger adults (cf. May et al, 1999;Jonides et al, 2000;Schmiedek et al, 2009;Loosli et al, 2014). Hasher et al (2002) showed that compared to young adults, older adults are less able to delete no longer relevant items from WM due to deficient inhibition processes, which results in the inability to differ between relevant and irrelevant items and therefore in more intrusion errors, i.e.…”

Impact of ageing on problem size and proactive interference in arithmetic facts solving

“…In the non-numerical domain, it has repeatedly been observed that older adults have more difficulty resolving proactive interference in memory tasks (e.g., Chiappe, Siegel, & Hasher, 2000;Jonides et al, 2000;Loosli, Rahm, Unterrainer, Weiller, & Kaller, 2014;May, Hasher, & Kane, 1999;Thompson-Schill et al, 2002). For instance, Jonides et al (2000) compared age-related changes in proactive interference via the recent probes task (Monsell, 1978).…”