Abstract
Several cognitive functions show a decline with advanced age, most prominently episodic memory. Problem-solving by insight represents a special associative form of problem-solving that has previously been shown to facilitate long-term memory formation. Recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that the encoding network involved in insight-based memory formation is largely hippocampus-independent. This may represent a potential advantage in older adults, as the hippocampus is one of the earliest brain structures to show age-related volume loss and functional impairment. Here, we investigated the potential beneficial effects of learning by insight in healthy older (60–79 years) compared to young adults (19–28 years). To this end, we compared later memory performance for verbal riddles encoded incidentally via induced insight-like sudden comprehension in both age groups. We employed a variant of the Compound Remote Associate Task (CRAT) for incidental encoding, during which participants were instructed to judge the solvability of items. In a 24-h delayed surprise memory test, participants attempted to solve previously encountered items and additionally performed a recognition memory test. During this test, older adults correctly solved an equal proportion of new CRA items compared to young adults and both age groups reported a similar frequency of Aha! experiences. While overall memory performance was better in young participants (higher proportion of correctly solved and correctly recognized old CRA items), older participants exhibited a stronger beneficial effect of insight-like sudden comprehension on later recognition memory for CRA items. Our results suggest that learning via insight might constitute a promising approach to improve memory function in old age.
Highlights
Human cognitive functioning is subject to considerable alterations during aging, most prominently with regard to memory function
Some cross-sectional studies suggest a linear decline, longitudinal studies, which evade cohort-effects like different generationdependent educational backgrounds, show that episodic memory remains stable for a long time, before it begins to decline around the mid-60ies (Zelinski and Burnight, 1997)
To our knowledge, the first study to assess learning by induced insight in participants of advanced age, we looked into a set of exploratory questions: (4) Are there age-related differences in the frequency of Aha! experiences reported for true and false insights, i.e., correct and incorrect solutions? Generally, Aha! experiences are reported more often for correctly solved items as compared to incorrect solutions (Danek and Wiley, 2017; Danek and Salvi, 2018)
Summary
Human cognitive functioning is subject to considerable alterations during aging, most prominently with regard to memory function. Younger and older adults appear to differ considerably in their use of attentional resources as well as their active semantic elaboration of novel information, which has been associated with age-related structural and functional alterations in lateral fronto-temporal regions like the inferior prefrontal cortex (attentional selection) and anterior temporal lobe (semantic integration). This has profound consequences for memory performance as it affects the level-of-processing of novel information and efficiency of encoding (Craik and Lockhart, 1972). When older adults are encouraged to use deeper levels of encoding by actively making semantic decisions about novel information, later memory performance can be improved (Grady and Craik, 2000)
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