Effects of time of day on age-related associative deficits.

Abstract

Time of day is known to influence cognition differently across age groups, with young adults performing better later than earlier in the day and older adults showing the opposite pattern. Thus age-related deficits can be smaller when testing occurs in the morning compared with the afternoon/evening, particularly for tasks requiring executive/controlled/inhibitory processes. Stronger influences of time of day were therefore predicted on associative than on item recognition memory based on their differential requirements for demanding recollective (rather than familiarity) processes. In 2 experiments, participants were presented with unrelated word pairs and then tested on both item recognition (old/new item?) and associative recognition (intact/recombined pair?). In Experiment 1, young adults were tested either in the morning or in the evening; recognition memory was better when time of testing matched participants' morningness-eveningness preferences, and more so for associative than for item memory. In Experiment 2, young and older adults (evening and morning types, respectively) were tested both in the morning and in the evening; again, recognition memory was better at participants' preferred times of day, especially for associative memory. Consequently, age-related associative deficits varied considerably-indeed more than fourfold-from a nonsignificant 8% for testing in the morning to a substantial 35% for testing in the evening, suggesting that it is important to consider time of day effects in future studies of the associative deficit hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record

Differential effects of alcohol on associative versus item memory

“…The response bias measure, c (see Table ), was slightly but significantly more positive for item than for associative memory, P = 0.008, suggesting a greater conservative bias toward responding no/not seen before for item memory. Such a difference has been noted before (Bender, Naveh‐Benjamin, & Raz, ; Maylor & Badham, ). Importantly, there was no effect of condition and no interaction between condition and memory type (both F s < 1), indicating no influence of alcohol on response bias.…”

“…First, it was conducted in a naturalistic social setting rather than under distraction‐free laboratory conditions. This may partly account for the slightly lower levels of performance in the no‐alcohol condition in comparison with data from students tested in the evening using a similar paradigm (Maylor & Badham, ), though as already mentioned, the additional prospective memory requirement here may also have contributed to this small difference. (Of course, it could be argued that the present context is more appropriate for applied research.)…”

“…In the present study, we examined the acute effects of alcohol under naturalistic conditions of social drinking in young adults. We employed the same recognition memory paradigm with unrelated word pairs as Naveh‐Benjamin (; see also Maylor & Badham, ). In view of the supposed parallels between the effects of aging and alcohol, we predicted a similar interaction between alcohol condition and memory type.…”

Age-related differences in associative memory: Empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives.

“…The article by Maylor and Badham (2018) highlights the importance of time of day for associative memory performance. Following on previous studies implicating circadian rhythm, as a moderator of age-related differences in memory (e.g., May, Hasher, & Stoltzfus, 1993), this article shows that older adults' associative memory deficit is the largest when older adults are tested at their nonoptimal times and younger adults are tested at their optimal times. Interestingly, the deficit is minimized when older adults are tested at their optimal times and young adults at their nonoptimal times, and the authors suggest that one potential modulating factor in the effect of time of the day on age-related associative memory deficits is its effect on strategic/elaborative encoding (e.g., Naveh -Benjamin, Brav, & Levy, 2007) and on engaging in recollected processing and strategic retrieval (e.g., Cohn, Emrich, & Moscovitch, 2008), both of which are particularly involved in associative memory performance.…”

Two nights of recovery sleep restores hippocampal connectivity but not episodic memory after total sleep deprivation

“…1b) also had the same three fMRI scans on the mornings of days 2, 3, and 5, but they were provided 8 hours TIB sleep on nights 2 to 4. Because previous studies have suggested that time-of-day may modulate brain activity and memory performance [95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104] , the time of fMRI scans and cognitive tests were fixed for all subjects and kept constant across the whole protocol to minimize the potential confounding time-of-day effects.…”