Misrecollection prevents older adults from benefitting from semantic relatedness of the memoranda in associative memory

Emma Delhaye; Roni Tibon; Nurit Gronau; Daniel A. Levy; Christine Bastin

doi:10.1080/13825585.2017.1358351

Misrecollection prevents older adults from benefitting from semantic relatedness of the memoranda in associative memory

Emma Delhaye, Roni Tibon, Nurit Gronau, Daniel A. Levy, Christine Bastin

Psychology discipline

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Memory for episodic associations declines in aging, ostensibly due to decreased recollection abilities. Accordingly, associative unitization - the encoding of associated items as one integrated entity - may potentially attenuate age-related associative deficits by enabling familiarity-based retrieval, which is relatively preserved in aging. To test this hypothesis, we induced bottom-up unitization by manipulating semantic relatedness between memoranda. Twenty-four young and 24 older adults studied pairs of object pictures that were either semantically related or unrelated. Participants subsequently discriminated between intact, recombined and new pairs. We found that semantic relatedness increased the contributions of both familiarity and recollection in young adults, but did not improve older adults' performance. Instead, they showed associative deficits, driven by increased recollection-based false recognition. This may reflect a “misrecollection” phenomenon, in which older adults make more false alarms to recombined pairs with particularly high confidence, due to poorer retrieval monitoring regarding semantically-related associative probes.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	634-654
Number of pages	21
Journal	Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
Volume	25
Issue number	5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2017.1358351
State	Published - 3 Sep 2018

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the University of Liege, the Léon Frédéricq Foundation, the Alzheimer Research Foundation (SAO-FRA; grant S#14003), the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Special Funds for Research (grant #FSRC-14/11), the Inter-University Attraction Pole P7/11 and a Newton International Fellowship by the Royal Society and the British Academy (grant SUAI/009/ RG91715). Open access fees were paid by the UK Medical Research Council Program - Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge SUAG/022 (General Science).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

Episodic memory
aging
familiarity
semantic memory
unitization

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10.1080/13825585.2017.1358351

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title = "Misrecollection prevents older adults from benefitting from semantic relatedness of the memoranda in associative memory",

abstract = "Memory for episodic associations declines in aging, ostensibly due to decreased recollection abilities. Accordingly, associative unitization - the encoding of associated items as one integrated entity - may potentially attenuate age-related associative deficits by enabling familiarity-based retrieval, which is relatively preserved in aging. To test this hypothesis, we induced bottom-up unitization by manipulating semantic relatedness between memoranda. Twenty-four young and 24 older adults studied pairs of object pictures that were either semantically related or unrelated. Participants subsequently discriminated between intact, recombined and new pairs. We found that semantic relatedness increased the contributions of both familiarity and recollection in young adults, but did not improve older adults' performance. Instead, they showed associative deficits, driven by increased recollection-based false recognition. This may reflect a “misrecollection” phenomenon, in which older adults make more false alarms to recombined pairs with particularly high confidence, due to poorer retrieval monitoring regarding semantically-related associative probes.",

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AU - Levy, Daniel A.

AU - Bastin, Christine

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AB - Memory for episodic associations declines in aging, ostensibly due to decreased recollection abilities. Accordingly, associative unitization - the encoding of associated items as one integrated entity - may potentially attenuate age-related associative deficits by enabling familiarity-based retrieval, which is relatively preserved in aging. To test this hypothesis, we induced bottom-up unitization by manipulating semantic relatedness between memoranda. Twenty-four young and 24 older adults studied pairs of object pictures that were either semantically related or unrelated. Participants subsequently discriminated between intact, recombined and new pairs. We found that semantic relatedness increased the contributions of both familiarity and recollection in young adults, but did not improve older adults' performance. Instead, they showed associative deficits, driven by increased recollection-based false recognition. This may reflect a “misrecollection” phenomenon, in which older adults make more false alarms to recombined pairs with particularly high confidence, due to poorer retrieval monitoring regarding semantically-related associative probes.

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Misrecollection prevents older adults from benefitting from semantic relatedness of the memoranda in associative memory

Abstract

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Keywords

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