Effects of perceptual similarity but not semantic association on false recognition in aging.

Kayleigh Burnside,Caroline Hope,Alexa M Morcom,Emma Gill

doi:10.7717/peerj.4184

Abstract

This study investigated semantic and perceptual influences on false recognition in older and young adults in a variant on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. In two experiments, participants encoded intermixed sets of semantically associated words, and sets of unrelated words. Each set was presented in a shared distinctive font. Older adults were no more likely to falsely recognize semantically associated lure words compared to unrelated lures also presented in studied fonts. However, they showed an increase in false recognition of lures which were related to studied items only by a shared font. This increased false recognition was associated with recollective experience. The data show that older adults do not always rely more on prior knowledge in episodic memory tasks. They converge with other findings suggesting that older adults may also be more prone to perceptually-driven errors.

Highlights

It is well established that memory for events is impaired in even healthy aging (Light, 1991)
The current study examined older and young adults’ susceptibility to semantic and perceptual influences on false recognition using a variant on the DRM paradigm (Fig. 1)
In the Correlated Font conditions, age effects on false recognition were non-significant for both Critical and Related lures, Bayes Factors showed only anecdotal evidence for the null hypothesis, t (41.2) = .89, p = .38, BF01 = 2.5; t (36.8) = −1.65, p = .108; BF01 = 1.2. These findings suggested that older adults showed an increase only in perceptually-driven false recognition, but we analyzed false recollection and adjusted measures to rule out effects of response criterion

Summary

Introduction

It is well established that memory for events is impaired in even healthy aging (Light, 1991). An emerging hypothesis is that prior knowledge, which is well maintained in older age, can support declining episodic memory to some degree (Naveh-Benjamin et al, 2003; Castel, 2005; Umanath & Marsh, 2014). This support may be a ‘‘double-edged sword’’ (Reder et al, 2007), bringing a greater cost in memory errors than in the young. In the categorized pictures paradigm, older adults are more likely

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion