Is refreshing in working memory impaired in older age? Evidence from the retro‐cue paradigm

Loaiza, Vanessa M.; Souza, Alessandra S.

doi:10.1111/nyas.13623

Cited by 26 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…Moreover, including a perceptual matching task to ensure that younger and older adults did not differ in memory precision due to for instance greater motor noise in older adults may have been informative. However, Loaiza and Souza (2018) found that while there was an age difference in perceptual matching, it was much smaller than that observed in the WM task, suggesting that it did not fully account for the age differences in WM precision memory (see also, Souza, 2016;Loaiza & Souza, 2019). Also, age-related perceptual and/or motor differences are unlikely to vary between our experimental conditions.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 67%

Cognitive aging and verbal labeling in continuous visual memory

2020

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The decline of working memory (WM) is a common feature of general cognitive decline, and visual and verbal WM capacity appear to decline at different rates with age. Visual material may be remembered via verbal codes or visual traces, or both. Souza and Skóra, Cognition, 166, 277–297 (2017) found that labeling boosted memory in younger adults by activating categorical visual long-term memory (LTM) knowledge. Here, we replicated this and tested whether it held in healthy older adults. We compared performance in silence, under instructed overt labeling (participants were asked to say color names out loud), and articulatory suppression (repeating irrelevant syllables to prevent labeling) in the delayed estimation paradigm. Overt labeling improved memory performance in both age groups. However, comparing the effect of overt labeling and suppression on the number of coarse, categorical representations in the two age groups suggested that older adults used verbal labels subvocally more than younger adults, when performing the task in silence. Older adults also appeared to benefit from labels differently than younger adults. In younger adults labeling appeared to improve visual, continuous memory, suggesting that labels activated visual LTM representations. However, for older adults, labels did not appear to enhance visual, continuous representations, but instead boosted memory via additional verbal (categorical) memory traces. These results challenged the assumption that visual memory paradigms measure the same cognitive ability in younger and older adults, and highlighted the importance of controlling differences in age-related strategic preferences in visual memory tasks.

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Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 67%

Cognitive aging and verbal labeling in continuous visual memory

2020

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“…Results from retrocue paradigms, conversely, are akin to the use of attention to ignore an irrelevant content maintained in visual WM [55]. Although some initial studies pointed to age-deficits in using retrocues [56,57], subsequent studies have consistently obtained retrocue benefits of similar magnitude between younger and older adults [50,[58][59][60][61]. Together with the present findings, more and more behavioral evidence indicates that the source of the robust age-related decline observed in visual WM is unlikely to be explained by deficits in inhibiting irrelevant information.…”

Section: Aging Deficits In the Control Of Attention?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Age Differences in the Efficiency of Filtering and Ignoring Distraction in Visual Working Memory

Maniglia

Souza

2020

Brain Sciences

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Healthy aging is associated with decline in the ability to maintain visual information in working memory (WM). We examined whether this decline can be explained by decreases in the ability to filter distraction during encoding or to ignore distraction during memory maintenance. Distraction consisted of irrelevant objects (Exp. 1) or irrelevant features of an object (Exp. 2). In Experiment 1, participants completed a spatial WM task requiring remembering locations on a grid. During encoding or during maintenance, irrelevant distractor positions were presented. In Experiment 2, participants encoded either single-feature (colors or orientations) or multifeature objects (colored triangles) and later reproduced one of these features using a continuous scale. In multifeature blocks, a precue appeared before encoding or a retrocue appeared during memory maintenance indicating with 100% certainty to the to-be-tested feature, thereby enabling filtering and ignoring of the irrelevant (not-cued) feature, respectively. There were no age-related deficits in the efficiency of filtering and ignoring distractor objects (Exp. 1) and of filtering irrelevant features (Exp. 2). Both younger and older adults could not ignore irrelevant features when cued with a retrocue. Overall, our results provide no evidence for an aging deficit in using attention to manage visual WM.

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“…There is some evidence to suggest that the refreshing of memory representations is less effective in older adults (e.g. Fanuel, Plancher, Monsaingeon, Tillmann, & Portrat, 2018;Loaiza & McCabe, 2013; although see Loaiza & Souza, 2017;Souza, 2016 for conflicting evidence from a cued refreshing paradigm). That being said, by adjusting task demand for each individual to a common single task accuracy level, it may be argued that age-differences in prioritization cost will not appear.…”

Section: Deriving Predictions From Multiple Component Time-based Resmentioning

confidence: 99%

Storage and processing in working memory: Assessing dual-task performance and task prioritization across the adult lifespan.

Rhodes¹,

Jaroslawska²,

Doherty³

et al. 2019

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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There is a theoretical disagreement in the working memory literature, with some proposing that the storage and processing of information rely on distinct parts of the cognitive system and others who posit that they rely, to some extent, on a shared attentional capacity. This debate is mirrored in the literature on working memory and aging, where there have been mixed findings on the ability of older adults to perform simultaneous storage and processing tasks. We assess the overlap between storage and processing and how this changes with age using a procedure in which both tasks have been carefully adjusted to produce comparable levels of single-task performance across a sample (N = 164) of participants aged 18-81. By manipulating incentives to perform one task over the other, this procedure was also capable of disentangling concurrence costs (single-versus dual-task performance) from prioritization costs (relative payoffs for storage versus processing performance) in a theoretically meaningful manner. The study revealed a large general cost to serial letter recall performance associated with concurrent performance of an arithmetic verification processing task, a concurrence cost that increased with age. For the processing task, there was no such general concurrence cost. Rather, there was a prioritization effect in dual-task performance for both tasks, irrespective of age, in which performance levels depended on the relative emphasis assigned to memory versus processing. This prioritization effect was large, albeit with a large residual in performance. The findings place important constraints on both working memory theory and our understanding of how working memory changes across the adult lifespan.

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Is refreshing in working memory impaired in older age? Evidence from the retro‐cue paradigm

Cited by 26 publications

References 62 publications

Cognitive aging and verbal labeling in continuous visual memory

Cognitive aging and verbal labeling in continuous visual memory

Age Differences in the Efficiency of Filtering and Ignoring Distraction in Visual Working Memory

Storage and processing in working memory: Assessing dual-task performance and task prioritization across the adult lifespan.

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