Abstract
This study examines how normal aging affects the occurrence of different types of incorrect responses in a visual short-term memory (VSTM) object-recall task. Seventeen young (Mean = 23.3 years, SD = 3.76), and 17 normally aging older (Mean = 66.5 years, SD = 6.30) adults participated. Memory stimuli comprised two or four real world objects (the memory load) presented sequentially, each for 650 ms, at random locations on a computer screen. After a 1000 ms retention interval, a test display was presented, comprising an empty box at one of the previously presented two or four memory stimulus locations. Participants were asked to report the name of the object presented at the cued location. Errors rates wherein participants reported the names of objects that had been presented in the memory display but not at the cued location (non-target errors) vs. objects that had not been presented at all in the memory display (non-memory errors) were compared. Significant effects of aging, memory load and target recency on error type and absolute error rates were found. Non-target error rate was higher than non-memory error rate in both age groups, indicating that VSTM may have been more often than not populated with partial traces of previously presented items. At high memory load, non-memory error rate was higher in young participants (compared to older participants) when the memory target had been presented at the earliest temporal position. However, non-target error rates exhibited a reversed trend, i.e., greater error rates were found in older participants when the memory target had been presented at the two most recent temporal positions. Data are interpreted in terms of proactive interference (earlier examined non-target items interfering with more recent items), false memories (non-memory items which have a categorical relationship to presented items, interfering with memory targets), slot and flexible resource models, and spatial coding deficits.
Highlights
An important component of working memory model that enables recent visual events to be remembered is visual short-term memory (VSTM; Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 1986, 2003)
We examined how these differences varied with memory load and target stimulus recency
A reverse trend was observed for non-target error rates, which were significantly greater for older participants compared to young participants when the memory target was presented at the two most recent temporal positions (Figures 4A,B), suggesting that older participants incurred more proactive interference compared to young participants (Bowles and Salthouse, 2006)
Summary
An important component of working memory model that enables recent visual events to be remembered is visual short-term memory (VSTM; Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 1986, 2003). After a brief retention interval, during which a blank field is typically presented, participants’ memory for the previously presented items is tested using paradigms such as change detection, yes–no recognition, or whole/partial recall (Pashler, 1988; Irwin, 1991; Irwin and Andrews, 1996; Luck and Vogel, 1997; Irwin and Zelinsky, 2002). These studies typically report that VSTM can store around 3– 4 multifaceted items at any time. A more recent alternative, the resource model, proposes that VSTM resources are shared between the items featuring in a memory display in a more continuous fashion, such that when the number of items to be remembered exceeds the capacity of VSTM, some (correspondingly impoverished) information that pertains to a larger number of items is retained (Wilken and Ma, 2004; Bays and Husain, 2008)
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