Abstract
Older adults consistently show elevated rates of false recognition of new items that are related to studied items. This finding has been largely attributed to a greater tendency for older adults to rely on conceptual gist during memory recognition tasks. However, perceptual factors may also be implicated considering that related items are not only conceptually but also perceptually similar. While some findings do suggest that age-related increases in false recognitions can be driven by perceptual factors, little is known about the nature and circumstances under which these factors operate. To address this gap, we measured basic visual ability as well as false recognition for four different image categories (upright faces, inverted faces, chairs, houses) in younger (n = 34) and older (n = 34) adults. Each image category represented different levels of variability in perceptual similarity and pre-experimental exposure. Perceptual similarity was objectively defined on the basis of the low-level properties of the images. We found evidence that perceptual similarity can contribute to elevated rates of false recognition in older adults. Our results also suggest that declines in basic visual abilities influence elevated false recognition in older adults for perceptually similar but not perceptually dissimilar items. We conclude that both perceptual and conceptual similarity can drive age-related differences in false recognition.
Highlights
Healthy aging is associated with a decline in recognition memory that is salient for items that share similar characteristics, such as when they are exemplars of the same category (Koutstaal and Schacter, 1997; Koutstaal et al, 1999; Lövdén, 2003; Taconnat and Rémy, 2006; Pidgeon and Morcom, 2014)
Burnside et al (2017) showed that older adults are just as likely to falsely recognize semantically vs. perceptually related new words from studied words. While these findings suggest that false recognitions can be driven by perceptual similarity, little is known about the nature and circumstances under which perceptual factors contribute to age-related elevation in false recognition
We investigated the contribution of perceptual factors to age-related differences in false recognition by comparing performance of younger and older adults on within-category recognition of upright faces, inverted faces, chairs, and houses
Summary
Healthy aging is associated with a decline in recognition memory that is salient for items that share similar characteristics, such as when they are exemplars of the same category (Koutstaal and Schacter, 1997; Koutstaal et al, 1999; Lövdén, 2003; Taconnat and Rémy, 2006; Pidgeon and Morcom, 2014). When study and test items are related, older adults are more likely than younger adults to falsely recognize new items as old. Different theories exist in the literature to explain age-related increases in false recognition (Rémy et al, 2008), including inefficient pattern separation (Toner et al, 2009) and a bias toward gist processing (Koutstaal and Schacter, 1997; Schacter et al, 1997a; Koutstaal et al, 1999). Aging is thought to lead to inefficient pattern separation, whereby the distinctiveness or pattern separation between neuronal representations is reduced, leading to false recognition of items similar to those presented at study (Wilson et al, 2006; Yassa et al, 2011a,b). Behavioral and imaging studies in humans, as well as studies with animals, support the notion that aging leads to a reduction in pattern separation in the hippocampus and visual cortical areas (Koutstaal et al, 2001b; Chouinard et al, 2008), which may account for increased false recognition in older adults (Wilson et al, 2006; Toner et al, 2009)
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