Can the elderly take the action? – The influence of unitization induced by action relationships on the associative memory deficit

Abstract

Healthy aging is associated with intact familiarity, whereas recollection, usually supporting associative memory, is attenuated. Accordingly, associative memory shows a stronger age-related decline than item memory. One approach to alleviate age-related associative memory deficits is to increase the contribution of familiarity to associative memory by creating encoding conditions that allow to integrate separate stimuli to an entity (unitization). The current study investigated whether bottom-up unitization can reduce age-related differences in associative memory. Younger (YA) and older adults (OA) studied associations between semantically unrelated objects, spatially arranged in a way that an action between these two objects is possible (unitized, e.g., emptying a bottle into a sneaker) or not (non-unitized). At test, participants distinguished intact from recombined and new object pairs. As expected, we found larger age differences for associative memory than for item memory. Additionally, the presence of action relationships supports memory performance in both age groups. In the event-related potentials (ERP) of the test phase, we observed an age-related attenuation of recollection and preserved familiarity independent of the action relationship condition. Considering comparisons including the recombined pairs, the ERP correlate of associative familiarity (i.e., intact vs. recombined) was present in OA for action-related pairs, whereas for YA, there was no evidence for enhanced familiarity for action-related pairs. In the late time window, ERP evidence for recollection for intact action-related object pairs was obtained independent of age group. In conclusion, both age groups benefited from unitization by action relationships but by different mechanisms. While YA show no associative familiarity for action-related object pairs but a general reliance on recollection for associations in action-related and –unrelated pairs, OA seem to rely more on familiarity for the specific arrangement of action-related pairs.