Tests of the DRYAD theory of the age-related deficit in memory for context: Not about context, and not about aging.

Abstract

Older adults exhibit a disproportionate deficit in their ability to recover contextual elements or source information about prior encounters with stimuli. A recent theoretical account, DRYAD (Benjamin, 2010), attributes this selective deficit to a global decrease in memory fidelity with age, moderated by weak representation of contextual information. The predictions of DRYAD are tested here in three experiments. We show that an age-related deficit obtains for whichever aspect of the stimulus subjects’ attention is directed away from during encoding (Experiment 1), suggesting a central role for attention in producing the age-related deficit in context. We also show that an analogous deficit can be elicited within young subjects with a manipulation of study time (Experiment 2), suggesting that any means of reducing memory fidelity yields an interaction of the same form as the age-related effect. Experiment 3 evaluates the critical prediction of DRYAD that endorsement probability in an exclusion task should vary nonmonotonically with memory strength. This prediction was confirmed by assessing the shape of the forgetting function in a continuous exclusion task. The results are consistent with the DRYAD account of aging and memory judgments and do not support the widely held view that aging entails the selective disruption of processes involved in encoding, storing, or retrieving contextual information.

Computational and empirical simulations of selective memory impairments: Converging evidence for a single-system account of memory dissociations

“…Zaki and Nosofsky (2001) adopted the strategy to show that classification is spared and recognition is not after a long study-test delay (see also Nosofsky & Zaki, 1998; Woods & Percy, 1974). Our experiments use the strategy as well: participants studied items quickly or slowly (see Benjamin, Diaz, Matzen, & Johnson, 2012; Jamieson et al, 2010). As in other work, our manipulation produced the dissociation between performance on an explicit versus implicit memory task.…”

Healthy aging and visual working memory: The effect of mixing feature and conjunction changes.

“…change is just as likely to occur for one feature as it is for the other). There is some evidence that attentional biases such as these to one component feature may be particularly harmful to older adults (Benjamin, Diaz, Matzen, & Johnson, 2012).…”

“…Including trials probing memory for both of the individual component features of a conjunction may be important as it ensures that participants are motivated to pay attention to each component feature equally (as a change is just as likely to occur for one feature as it is for the other). There is some evidence that attentional biases such as these to one component feature may be particularly harmful to older adults (Benjamin, Diaz, Matzen, & Johnson, 2012).…”

Older and wiser: Older adults’ episodic word memory benefits from sentence study contexts.

“…Elaboration or relating the sentences to their own experiences could aid the older adults in recollection of the old items and in recollection rejection of the lures by helping them to remember specific details about the sentences. In general, stimuli that older adults show an interest in or are instructed to attend to tend to reveal smaller age-related deficits, if any at all (Benjamin et al, 2011; May, Rahhal, Berry, & Leighton, 2005; Rahhal et al, 2002). …”