Hyper-binding across time: Age differences in the effect of temporal proximity on paired-associate learning.

Abstract

Older adults show hyper- (or excessive) binding effects for simultaneously and sequentially presented distraction. Here, we addressed the potential role of hyper-binding in paired-associate learning. Older and younger adults learned a list of word pairs and then received an associative recognition task in which rearranged pairs were formed from items that had originally occurred either close together or far apart in the study list. Across 3 experiments, older adults made more false alarms to near re-pairings than to far re-pairings. Younger adults, on the other hand, showed no difference in false alarms to the 2 types of rearranged pairs. These findings may be tied to the greater tendency of older adults to maintain access to recently attended information, inadvertently forming broader associations across time, than is the case for younger adults.

Age-related changes in neural oscillations supporting context memory retrieval

“…Thus, older adults were more likely to encode the attended with the unattended context, and this reduced their ability to selectively retrieve the appropriate contextual details. This is consistent with hyper-binding, where older adults are more likely to encode target and distractor items appearing simultaneously (Campbell et al, 2010) or occurring close in temporal proximity (Campbell, Trelle, & Hasher, 2014). Importantly, the conditional dependence found in older adults did not differ between the two study-test cycles, indicating that this result was not a function of task experience during the first study-test cycle.…”

What–where–when memory and encoding strategies in healthy aging

“…In the "associative deficit hypothesis" Naveh-Benjamin (2000) argues older adults are less able to create and retrieve links between single units of information (Chalfonte and Johnson 1996;Naveh-Benjamin 2000;Naveh-Benjamin et al 2007). In contrast, the "hyperbinding hypothesis" (Campbell et al 2010(Campbell et al , 2014 suggests that older adults may be unable to down-regulate attention to irrelevant information, instead dispersing their attention across other information in the study environment that is spatially (e.g., other things in the scene) or temporally (e.g., the previous trial) close to target items. As such the correct associations are encoded, but associations are also encoded between distractor items or irrelevant environmental features, making retrieval of the target information more difficult.…”

Discrimination performance in aging is vulnerable to interference and dissociable from spatial memory

“…Relative to young adults, older subjects are particularly susceptible to proactive interference on working memory tests when similar stimuli are presented (Lustig and Hasher 2001;Rowe et al 2010). Older adults also show a reduced ability to suppress irrelevant information and are more likely to take this information into account when selecting responses, an effect that is prominent when stimuli were experienced in temporal proximity or within the same sensory modality (Gazzaley et al 2005;Campbell et al 2014). Given that the match-to-position task implemented in the current study requires resolution of similar visuospatial stimuli and active suppression of irrelevant information, since goal locations from previous trials are no longer useful for present trials, it is probable that working memory abilities contribute to successful performance.…”