The proportion of working memory items recoverable from long-term memory remains fixed despite adult aging.

Forsberg, Alicia; Guitard, Dominic; Greene, Nathaniel R.; Naveh–Benjamin, Moshe; Cowan, Nelson

doi:10.1037/pag0000703

Cited by 10 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Effects of aging on working memory capacity have been widely documented (e.g., Cowan et al, 2006; Greene et al, 2020; Light & Anderson, 1985; Wingfield et al, 1988). Recent research has shown that older adults’ working memory capacity limitations can account for their deficits in long-term memory by constraining how much information becomes available in long-term memory (Forsberg et al, under review; but see Bartsch et al, 2019). Given that age-related working memory limitations appear to constrain long-term memory retention and that older adults are less likely to remember episodic associations at specific levels of representation in long-term memory (Greene & Naveh-Benjamin, 2020), it is important to assess whether older adults can initially remember specific details of associations in working memory.…”

Section: On the Relationship Between Working And Long-term Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adult age differences in specific and gist associative episodic memory across short- and long-term retention intervals.

Greene¹,

Naveh–Benjamin²

2022

Psychology and Aging

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Age-related deficits in associative episodic memory have been widely reported, but recent research suggests that some of these deficits occur for highly specific but not gist representations. It remains undetermined whether older adults' deficits in specific associative episodic memory, observed in long-term memory, are also present in short-term memory. We used a continuous associative recognition task to address this question. Fifty young and 50 older adults studied face-scene pairs, with memory tests occurring in both short-term and long-term memory. Memory tests featured intact (old) pairs, related (similar) pairs, and unrelated (dissimilar) pairs. On short-term memory tests, older adults were less accurate in classifying related pairs, which was manifest by age-related reductions in the probability of retrieving specific memory to engage in recollection rejection. However, older adults were capable of remembering specific details in short-term memory for intact probes but were less likely to remember specific details in long-term memory. Finally, older adults were always as capable as younger adults of remembering gist details. Results suggest that older adults do at least partially encode specific representations in short-term memory, and their access to these specific representations is cue dependent-they can do so when there is a large correspondence between encoding and retrieval conditions but are less likely to engage in deeper elaboration at retrieval. This limits their ability to remember specific details of associations to suppress false recognitions in short-term memory and to engage in veridical recognition in long-term memory. Public Significance StatementAdult aging is associated with a loss of memory for specific details of past experiences, yet little is known about how quickly older adults forget specific representations in episodic memory. The present study shows that older adults exhibit some losses in the ability to remember specific details of past episodes almost immediately after encountering those episodes. At the same time, given the right retrieval cues in short-term memory, older adults can successfully remember some specific details of a recently encoded episode as well as younger adults. Moreover, older adults can successfully remember past episodes at gist levels of representation in both short-and long-term memory.

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Section: On the Relationship Between Working And Long-term Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adult age differences in specific and gist associative episodic memory across short- and long-term retention intervals.

Greene¹,

Naveh–Benjamin²

2022

Psychology and Aging

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“…The authors found that although both short-and long-term memories were impaired in older adults compared to their young counterparts, the degree of impairment from STM to LTM was equivalent in both groups [42]. They interpreted their findings as supporting a shared encoding bottleneck between the two memory systems [42]. However, in this study, memories were not reproduced explicitly, allowing responses based on familiarity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

“…In both cases, participants' memories were assessed by showing them an object, which was either novel or an item from the memory array in 50% of trials and asking them to indicate their response by rating their confidence on a six-item scale. The authors found that although both short-and long-term memories were impaired in older adults compared to their young counterparts, the degree of impairment from STM to LTM was equivalent in both groups [42]. They interpreted their findings as supporting a shared encoding bottleneck between the two memory systems [42].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…One recent study has managed to overcome these issues by testing short-and longterm memories for object identities in young and older adults [42]. The task involved showing participants two, four or six icons and then assessing their memories for these items either at the end of each trial, two seconds after the presentation of the stimuli (STM), or in a subsequent task (LTM), separated by a one-minute distractor task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both experiments were carried out with a high level of experimental control and employed STM and LTM tasks that shared a common encoding phase and were equivalent in stimulus materials and response demands. Short-term memories were probed after a delay of 8 s in the absence of any interruption, following previous research on visual short-term memories [10,20,[36][37][38]42]. Intervals with durations of 15-20 min and including intervening distraction were employed to separate LTM encoding and retrieval stages [10,[42][43][44].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Relationship between Short- and Long-Term Memory Is Preserved across the Age Range

et al. 2023

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Both short- and long-term memories decline with healthy ageing. The aims of the current study were twofold: firstly, to build on previous studies and investigate the presence of a relationship between short- and long-term memories and, secondly, to examine cross-sectionally whether there are changes in this relationship with age. In two experiments, participants across the age range were tested on contextual-spatial memories after short and long memory durations. Experimental control in stimulus materials and task demands enabled the analogous encoding and probing for both memory durations, allowing us to examine the relationship between the two memory systems. Across two experiments, in line with previous studies, we found both short-term memory and long-term memory declined from early to late adulthood. Additionally, there was a significant relationship between short- and long-term memory performance, which, interestingly, persisted throughout the age range. Our findings suggest a significant degree of common vulnerability to healthy ageing for short- and long-term memories sharing the same spatial-contextual associations. Furthermore, our tasks provide a sensitive and promising framework for assessing and comparing memory function at different timescales in disorders with memory deficits at their core.

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A lifespan study of the confidence–accuracy relation in working memory and episodic long-term memory.

Greene,

Forsberg,

Guitard

et al. 2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Self Cite

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The relation between an individual's memory accuracy and reported confidence in their memories can indicate self-awareness of memory strengths and weaknesses. We provide a lifespan perspective on this confidence-accuracy relation, based on two previously published experiments with 320 participants, including children aged 6-13, young adults aged 18-27, and older adults aged 65-77, across tests of working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM). Participants studied visual items in arrays of varying set sizes and completed item recognition tests featuring 6-point confidence ratings either immediately after studying each array (WM tests) or following a long period of study events (LTM tests). Confidence-accuracy characteristic analyses showed that accuracy improved with increasing confidence for all age groups and in both WM and LTM tests. These findings reflect a universal ability across the lifespan to use awareness of the strengths and limitations of one's memories to adjust reported confidence. Despite this age invariance in the confidence-accuracy relation, however, young children were more prone to high-confidence memory errors than other groups in tests of WM, whereas older adults were more susceptible to high-confidence false alarms in tests of LTM. Thus, although participants of all ages can assess when their memories are weaker or stronger, individuals with generally weaker memories are less adept at this confidence-accuracy calibration. Findings also speak to potential different sources of high-confidence memory errors for young children and older adults, relative to young adults. Public Significance StatementOur ability to accurately evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our memories is critical to how we make decisions and can influence how much confidence other people can place in our reported experiences, as in eyewitness testimony. The present study reveals a strikingly universal ability of individuals from young childhood to older adulthood in calibrating their confidence in their memory with their observed accuracy in recognition. However, young children and older adults are more susceptible to high-confidence memory errors, but during different phases of memory retention, with young children's high-confidence errors arising in working memory and those of older adults appearing mostly in longterm memory. These findings suggest that different mechanisms underlie why young children and older adults generally have poorer memory than adolescents and young adults.

show abstract

The proportion of working memory items recoverable from long-term memory remains fixed despite adult aging.

Cited by 10 publications

References 65 publications

Adult age differences in specific and gist associative episodic memory across short- and long-term retention intervals.

Adult age differences in specific and gist associative episodic memory across short- and long-term retention intervals.

The Relationship between Short- and Long-Term Memory Is Preserved across the Age Range

A lifespan study of the confidence–accuracy relation in working memory and episodic long-term memory.

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