Effects of changes in schematic support and of item repetition on age-related associative memory deficits: Theoretically-driven empirical attempts to reduce older adults' high false alarm rate.

Abstract

Older adults seem to have a special difficulty binding components of their episodic memories to each other and retrieving these bound units. This phenomenon, known as the age-related associative memory deficit, is partially driven by high false alarm rates in the associative test. The current research examines whether 2 factors: (a) manipulations of changes of schematic support between study and test (potentially affecting recollection) and (b) item repetition (potentially affecting item familiarity) might decrease older adults' false alarm rate, thereby resulting in a smaller associative memory deficit. Younger and older adults were tested for their item and associative recognition memory after viewing product-price pairs (Experiment 1) and face-name pairs (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, products were paired with either an underestimated price, a market-value price, or an overestimated price, with the match or mismatch in the product-price relationships between study and test serving as the manipulation of schematic information. In Experiment 2, schematic information was manipulated by the match of the age of the face (young or old) appearing with a given name between study and test. Item familiarity was manipulated by having a preexposure phase of the item components in both experiments. Results indicated that low item familiarity (Experiment 2), which potentially reduces the familiarity of a given pair, and mismatch in schematic knowledge between study and test (Experiments 1 and 2), increase older adults' ability to reject recombined item-price and face-name pairs at retrieval, resulting in a reduced associative memory deficit. (PsycINFO Database Record