Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Episodic memory (EM) is disproportionately impaired in normal healthy aging. However, experimental comparisons and literature reviews of the neural correlates of EM across lab-based and naturalistic paradigms reveal significant differences. The current study systematically manipulated the degree of naturalism by testing memory for the same content encoded in a naturalistic vs. laboratory context in order to investigate how memory performance interacts with the properties of the encoding context in younger and older adults. We found that the naturalistic event was subsequently associated with greater overall recognition accuracy, specifically for sequence information, and was associated with a greater contribution of re-experiencing to recognition. We found no significant interaction of normal aging with the event manipulation, but our older sample is currently too small to draw definitive conclusions. Overall, our results suggest that the experimental manipulation of a controlled real-life event is a viable method for studying naturalistic episodic memory.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Nicholas B. Diamond
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3151776905