Younger and older adults’ associative memory for social information: The role of information importance.

Hargis, Mary B.; Castel, Alan D.

doi:10.1037/pag0000171

Cited by 25 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…In both experiments, the associative recognition accuracy of both groups increased given task experience. This is similar to prior work suggesting that older adults benefit from prior successful task performance (Geraci & Miller, 2013; Hargis & Castel, 2017; Kilb & Naveh-Benjamin, 2011), and suggests that repeated study and retrieval of associative information regarding medication interactions can benefit overall recall of important pairs of items, even when there are interfering connections among medications. Additionally, the information was tested via associative recognition in which there were three answer choices.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…The associative deficit hypothesis suggests that the association of items in memory is detrimentally affected in older age (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). This deficit is pervasive and present in various memory recall tasks, including remembering word-nonword pairs (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000), pairs of pictures (Naveh-Benjamin, Hussain, Guez, & Bar-On, 2003), and name-face pairs (Naveh-Benjamin, Guez, Kilb, & Reedy, 2004; though this can be affected by the value of the information and reduced with repeated testing, see Hargis & Castel, 2017).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Younger and older adults’ associative memory for medication interactions of varying severity

Hargis

Castel

2018

Memory

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While older adults face various deficits in binding items in memory, they are often able to remember information that is deemed important. In Experiment 1, we examined how younger and older adults remember medication interactions of varying severity. There were no age differences in overall memory accuracy, but older adults' performance depended on the severity of the interactions (such that the interactions associated with the most severe health outcomes were remembered most accurately) while younger adults' did not. In Experiment 2, a similar task was designed to create interference in memory. Even with this more difficult task there were no age differences in recall accuracy, and both age groups remembered the interactions with the severe outcomes most accurately. These findings suggest that, under certain circumstances, older adults do not face deficits in associative recognition accuracy of information that varies in importance.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Younger and older adults’ associative memory for medication interactions of varying severity

Hargis

Castel

2018

Memory

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“…Such selectivity is emphasized by participants' study decisions in Experiment 2, with higher magnitudes receiving more study visits (and thus more total study time) despite equivalent study time per visit with lower magnitudes. As such, these results add further evidence that participants are effective in prioritizing important information, consistent with a large body of work demonstrating preserved selectivity with various materials like unrelated word pairs (Ariel et al, 2015), name-face pairs (Hargis & Castel, 2017), medication side effects (Hargis & Castel, 2018), and item-location pairs (Siegel & Castel, 2018b), and under varying degrees of cognitive ability, like healthy aging (Castel et al, 2002;Hayes et al, 2013;Siegel & Castel, 2018a), Alzheimer's disease (Castel et al, 2009), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (Castel et al, 2011), and different working memory capacities (Griffin, Benjamin, Sahakyan, & Stanley, 2019;Middlebrooks et al, 2017;Miller, Gross, & Unsworth, 2019;Robison & Unsworth, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Strategic encoding and enhanced memory for positive value-location associations

2020

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People often need to remember the location of important objects or events, and also to remember locations that are associated with negative objects. In the current study, we examined how both positive and negative items might be selectively remembered in the visuospatial domain. Participants studied number-items ranging from -25 to +25 indicating point values in a grid display and were instructed to maximize their score (a summation of correctly remembered positive and negative information; incorrectly placed negative items resulted in a subtraction from the overall score). Items were presented in a sequential, simultaneous (Experiment 1), or self-regulated format (Experiment 2) where participants controlled which items to study and the length of study time per item. In Experiment 1, participants selectively recalled high-magnitude over low-magnitude items, but also displayed a positivity preference in memory. In Experiment 2, we were able to determine whether this positivity preference was a result of bottom-up, automatic, or top-down strategic processes. Results indicated that participants explicitly chose to study positive items more frequently and for more total time relative to negative items, suggesting a deliberate strategy to focus on positive information. This bias for highly positive information suggests an overt points-gained approach, as opposed to a lossaversion approach, to remembering value in the visuospatial domain.

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“…It has been observed that the recreation of the future is more likely to be performed in the third person rather than from a first-person perspective ( D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2004 , 2006 ). In addition, in the current context of pandemic, social content can be perceived as high-value information or more important than personal content ( Hargis and Castel, 2017 ). Therefore, we expect a better recall of social than of personal imagined future events.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging

2021

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This study aimed to determine whether the observed tendency to remember more positive than negative past events (positivity phenomena) also appears when recalling hypothetical events about the future. In this study, young, middle-aged, and older adults were presented with 28 statements about the future associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, half positive and half negative. In addition, half of these statements were endowed with personal implications while the other half had a more social connotations. Participants rated their agreement/disagreement with each statement and, after a distraction task, they recalled as many statements as possible. There was no difference in the agreement ratings between the three age groups, but the participants agreed with positive statements more than with negative ones and they identified more with statements of social content than of personal content. The younger and older individuals recalled more statements than the middle-aged people. More importantly, older participants recalled more positive than negative statements (positivity effect), and showed a greater tendency to turn negative statements into more positive or neutral ones (positivity bias). These findings showed that the positivity effect occurs in even such complex and situations as the present pandemic, especially in older adults. The results are discussed by reference to the notion of commission errors and false memories resulting from the activation of cognitive biases.

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Younger and older adults’ associative memory for social information: The role of information importance.

Cited by 25 publications

References 28 publications

Younger and older adults’ associative memory for medication interactions of varying severity

Younger and older adults’ associative memory for medication interactions of varying severity

Strategic encoding and enhanced memory for positive value-location associations

Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging

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