Age-related differences in memory after attending to distinctiveness or similarity during learning |
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Authors: | Valerie A Carr Alan D Castel Barbara J Knowlton |
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Institution: | 1. Interdepartmental Program in Neuroscience, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA;2. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USAvalerie.a.carr@gmail.com;4. Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA |
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Abstract: | Episodic memory is vulnerable to age-related change, with older adults demonstrating both impairments in retrieving contextual details and susceptibility to interference among similar events. Such impairments may be due in part to an age-related decline in the ability to encode distinct memory representations. Recent research has examined how manipulating stimulus properties to emphasize distinctiveness can reduce age-related deficits in memory. However, few studies have addressed whether learning strategies that differentially encourage distinctiveness processing attenuate age-related differences in episodic memory. In the present study, participants engaged in two incidental encoding tasks emphasizing either distinctiveness or similarity processing. Results demonstrated higher rates of recollection for stimuli studied under the distinctiveness task than the similarity task in younger but not older adults. These findings suggest a declining capacity for distinctiveness processing to benefit memory in older adults, and raise the possibility that strategies that enhance gist-based encoding may attenuate age-related memory deficits. |
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Keywords: | aging memory learning strategy distinctiveness recollection |
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