Abstract
This study investigated whether “intentional” instructions could improve older adults' object memory and object-location memory about a scene by promoting object-oriented viewing. Eye movements of younger and older adults were recorded while they viewed a photograph depicting 12 household objects in a cubicle with or without the knowledge that memory about these objects and their locations would be tested (intentional vs. incidental encoding). After viewing, participants completed recognition and relocation tasks. Both instructions and age affected viewing behaviors and memory. Relative to incidental instructions, intentional instructions resulted in more accurate memory about object identity and object-location binding, but did not affect memory accuracy about overall positional configuration. More importantly, older adults exhibited more object-oriented viewing in the intentional than incidental condition, supporting the environmental support hypothesis.
Highlights
Older adults often perform worse than younger adults in a range of episodic memory tasks and normal aging appears to affect episodic memory for associations between items more than for individual items [1,2,3]
According to Craik [1], such age-related deficits in memory can be ‘‘characterized as inefficiencies of processing, rather than as true losses or breakages of mechanisms or structure’’ (p. 350). He suggested that memory performance of older adults can benefit from proper environmental supports, of which an essential part is delivered by instructions that encourage constructive operations
Participants were given a surprise recognition task to assess their object identity memory for both targets and distractors that had appeared in the photographs
Summary
Older adults often perform worse than younger adults in a range of episodic memory tasks and normal aging appears to affect episodic memory for associations between items more than for individual items [1,2,3]. Participants were given a surprise recognition task (i.e., an incidental memory test) to assess their object identity memory for both targets and distractors that had appeared in the photographs. They found that the older adults made more and longer fixations and, more fixations on the targets and distractors than the younger adults. Uttl and Graf (1993, Experiment 2) assessed object-location memory of younger and older adults after they had interacted with objects in an office [10] They manipulated instructions (intentional vs incidental) so that participants were with or without the knowledge of a subsequent memory test. It was hypothesized that the improved performance in the intentional condition would be related to particular viewing strategies that participants adopted in that condition
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