Levels of specificity in episodic memory: Insights from response accuracy and subjective confidence ratings in older adults and in younger adults under full or divided attention.

Abstract

We propose that the specificity with which associations in episodic memory can be remembered varies on a continuum. In Experiment 1, we provide further evidence that older adults' deficits in associative memory scale with the amount of specificity that needs to be retrieved. In Experiment 2, we address whether depleted attentional resources, simulated in young adults under divided attention at encoding, could account for older adults' associative memory specificity deficits. Participants studied face-scene pairs and later completed an associative recognition test, with test pairs that were old, highly similar or less similar to old pairs, or completely dissimilar. Participants rated their confidence in their decisions. False positive recognition responses increased with the amount of specificity needed to be retrieved. Whereas older adults' associative memory deficits scaled with how much specific information needed to be remembered, younger adults under divided attention had a more general deficit in associative memory. Confidence-accuracy analysis showed that participants were best able to calibrate their confidence when less specific information was needed to perform well. While divided attention young adults were generally prone to high-confidence errors, older adults' high-confidence errors were most apparent when highly specific information needed to be remembered. These results provide further evidence for levels of specificity in episodic memory. Access to the most specific levels is most vulnerable to forgetting, in line with a specificity principle of memory (Surprenant & Neath, 2009). Further, depleted attentional resources at encoding cannot entirely explain older adults' associative memory specificity deficits.

Online experimentation and sampling in cognitive aging research.

“…Indeed, there is considerable overlap in terms of variability in performance and in group-level means and 95% confidence intervals for the two sampling sites, in both groups, and for all probes. As reported in Greene et al, (2021), the only credible sampling site difference we obtained was for the Related-Specific probes: participants tested online were less likely to correctly endorse these probes as “recombined” than were participants tested in the laboratory. However, crucially, this effect did not interact with age, such that there was no credible evidence to suggest that this sampling site effect was larger or smaller in the older adults compared with the younger adults.…”

“…More recently, in Greene et al, (2021), we attempted in our first experiment to replicate this effect using a modified paradigm, in which participants make a two-choice discrimination (“intact” vs. “recombined” responses) to face-scene pairs that were old (i.e., Intact, such as an old man paired with a park scene with which he had originally appeared during the encoding phase of the experiment), highly similar but recombined (i.e., Related-Specific, such as the old man appearing with a different park scene than the one with which he had originally appeared during the encoding phase), somewhat less similar but recombined (i.e., Related-Broad, such as the old man appearing now with a forest, a different type of nature scene), and completely dissimilar but recombined (i.e., Unrelated, such as the old man appearing with a kitchen during the test phase, no longer a nature scene). After making an “intact” or “recombined” decision to each of the four types of test pairs described above, young and older adult participants were asked to rate their confidence in these decisions on a 3-point (“low,” “medium,” or “high”) scale.…”

“…In order to exemplify some of the points mentioned above with respect to advantages and limitations of online experimental cognitive aging studies, we briefly describe an experiment comparing young and older adults on an associative recognition task. The experiment was conducted both in the lab and online and has been reported elsewhere (Greene et al, 2021), but here we focus on the demographic characteristics of the samples and concentrate on similarities and differences in performance on the task between the laboratory and online samples, as this was not the primary focus of the study by Greene et al, (2021).…”

“…We began our data collection in the laboratory in winter 2020. However, we were not able to complete our data collection in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so we transitioned to online data collection to recruit the remainder of our participants in order to obtain our preplanned sample sizes (details about sample size determination can be found in Greene et al, 2021). We relied on the crowdsourcing platform Prolific to recruit young and older adult participants online.…”

“…The confidence–accuracy curves in Figure 2 depict how accurate participants were at identifying Intact probes as “intact” and all other probes as “recombined” at each level of confidence in these decisions (i.e., “low,” “medium,” and “high”). For example, for “high” confidence decisions to Intact probes, were participants more likely to correctly respond “intact” than incorrectly respond “recombined” before rating their confidence as “high?” To reiterate, one of the major motivations for our work in Greene et al, (2021) was to assess whether older adults’ high-confidence memory errors (e.g., Dodson et al, 2007) would be restricted to situations where older adults fail to remember highly specific information in episodic memory (i.e., needed to classify Related-Specific pairs, for which older adults were deficient relative to younger adults). What we found in that study was that older adults’ tendency to make high-confidence memory errors was, in fact, the greatest for Related-Specific pairs, but also modestly occurred for Related-Broad pairs (pairs which maintain a “fuzzier” representation to originally encoded pairs; e.g., Old Man—Park at encoding vs. Old Man—Forest at retrieval).…”