Visual feature binding in younger and older adults: encoding and suffix interference effects

Abstract

Three experiments investigated younger (18-25 yrs) and older (70-88 yrs) adults' temporary memory for colour-shape combinations (binding). We focused upon estimating the magnitude of the binding cost for each age group across encoding time (Experiment 1; 900/1500 ms), presentation format (Experiment 2; simultaneous/sequential), and interference (Experiment 3; control/suffix) conditions. In Experiment 1, encoding time did not differentially influence binding in the two age groups. In Experiment 2, younger adults exhibited poorer binding performance with sequential relative to simultaneous presentation, and serial position analyses highlighted a particular age-related difficulty remembering the middle item of a series (for all memory conditions). Experiments 1-3 demonstrated small to medium binding effect sizes in older adults across all encoding conditions, with binding less accurate than shape memory. However, younger adults also displayed negative effects of binding (small to large) in two of the experiments. Even when older adults exhibited a greater suffix interference effect in Experiment 3, this was for all memory types, not just binding. We therefore conclude that there is no consistent evidence for a visual binding deficit in healthy older adults. This relative preservation contrasts with the specific and substantial deficits in visual feature binding found in several recent studies of Alzheimer's disease.

Differential age-related effects on conjunctive and relational visual short-term memory binding

“…These results support previous findings obtained in separate studies and showing agerelated short-term binding difficulties for item-item and item-context relational associations (Borg et al, 2011;Chen & Naveh-Benjamin, 2012;Cowan et al, 2006;Fandakova et al, 2014;Mitchell, Johnson, Raye, Mather, et al, 2000;Olson et al, 2004), but no evidence for an associative deficit for colour-shape and colour-colour conjunctive associations (Brockmole & Logie, 2013;Brockmole et al, 2008;Brown & Brockmole, 2010;Brown et al, 2017;Isella et al, 2015;Parra et al, 2009;Read et al, 2016;Rhodes et al, 2016Rhodes et al, , 2017. Importantly, the current study demonstrates this differential age effect in a task in which all aspects of the procedure were identical across tasks except how objects and colours were related to each other, supporting the idea that this is the nature of the associations which is critical.…”

“…Additionally, the use of verbally accessible objects and colours may have allowed verbal recoding of the stimuli. This should not have strongly influenced the results because previous work showed the same pattern of equal age effect on feature and conjunctive binding short-term memory with difficult to verbalize materials (Brockmole et al, 2008, Experiment 2;Isella et al, 2015), meaningful shapes with articulatory suppression (Brockmole et al, 2008, Experiment 1;Brown & Brockmole, 2010;Brown et al, 2017;Rhodes et al, 2016) and meaningful shapes without articulatory suppression (Brockmole & Logie, 2013;Read et al, 2016). Yet, future work should confirm 19 our findings either with meaningless materials or with articulatory suppression.…”

“…Age-related decrease of short-term memory for face-scene pairings was also reported 4 2012). In contrast, a few studies suggested that aging does not affect disproportionately shortterm binding for conjunctive associations, such as colour-shape binding (Brockmole & Logie, 2013;Brockmole, Parra, Sala, & Logie, 2008;Brown & Brockmole, 2010;Brown, Niven, Logie, Rhodes, & Allen, 2017;Isella, Molteni, Mapelli, & Ferrarese, 2015;Read et al, 2016;Rhodes, Parra, & Logie, 2016) and colour-colour binding (Parra, Abrahams, Logie, & Sala, 2009). Thus, it appears that age differences in short-term binding may occur only when relational associations are involved.…”

Feature Binding of Common Everyday Items Is Not Affected by Age

“…Whereas age affects the retention of associations both in LTM and in STM (but see Bopp and Verhaeghen, 2009; Pertzov et al, 2015), it seems to spare the ability to hold surface features, such as shapes and colours, bound within integrated objects in STM (Brockmole et al, 2008; Parra et al, 2009b; Brown and Brockmole, 2010; Brockmole and Logie, 2013; Isella et al, 2015; Read et al, 2016; Brown et al, 2017). Rhodes and colleagues argued for a distinction between binding of extrinsic features (i.e., linking of distinct items or contextual features accompanying an item) and binding of features that define the intrinsic characteristics of an object (i.e., within-item binding) (see also Allen et al, 2013; Rhodes et al, 2015).…”

“…Rhodes and colleagues argued for a distinction between binding of extrinsic features (i.e., linking of distinct items or contextual features accompanying an item) and binding of features that define the intrinsic characteristics of an object (i.e., within-item binding) (see also Allen et al, 2013; Rhodes et al, 2015). Binding objects' intrinsic features appears to be an automatic process (Allen et al, 2006, 2009; Karlsen et al, 2010; but see Shen et al, 2015; Gao et al, 2017) that is largely spared by age (Parra et al, 2009b; Brown and Brockmole, 2010; Isella et al, 2015; Rhodes et al, 2015; Read et al, 2016; Brown et al, 2017). In contrast, binding extrinsic features requires more cognitive resources (e.g., associative functions of the medial temporal lobe), which appear to be more susceptible to the effects of age (Mitchell et al, 2006).…”