Binding too Much Rather than too Little: Age Differences in Attentional Control and the Implications for Associative Memory
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis investigated whether older adults’ reduced attentional control leads to hyper-binding or the obligatory formation of overly broad associations between events occurring in close temporal and spatial contiguity. Study 1 explored whether older, but not younger, adults form associations between co-occurring targets and distractors. Studies 2 and 3 explored whether this hyper-binding effect extends to sequential co-occurrences. Study 1 examined whether older adults’ lessened inhibitory control leads them to inadvertently form associations between co-occurring targets and distractors. Participants first performed a 1-back task on pictures overlapped with irrelevant words and were later given a paired-associates memory task that surreptitiously included preserved and disrupted pairs from the 1-back task. Older adults showed a memory advantage for preserved pairs and a disadvantage for disrupted pairs, while younger adults performed similarly across pair type, suggesting that older adults alone encode irrelevant co-occurrences in the environment. Study 2 examined whether older adults also encode sequential co-occurrences that are entirely contained within distracting information, regularities that younger adults manage to ignore. Participants viewed a series of red and green objects and performed a 1-back task on one of the colours. Both age groups showed similar learning of statistical regularities contained within the attended stream. However, only older adults showed learning of regularities contained within the unattended stream. Finally, Study 3 examined whether older adults form associations across successive pairs within a paired-associate learning task. Participants learned a list of word pairs and then received an associative recognition task in which rearranged pairs had originally occurred either close together or far apart in the study list. Unlike younger adults, older adults made more false alarms to near repairings than to far repairings, suggesting that older adults alone had inadvertently formed associations across successive pairs at study.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Karen L. Campbell
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2668630990