Abstract
Visual working memory for features and bindings is susceptible to age-related decline. Two experiments were used to examine whether older adults are able to strategically prioritise more valuable information in working memory and whether this could reduce age-related impairments. Younger (18–33 years) and older (60–90 years) adults were presented with coloured shapes and, following a brief delay, asked to recall the feature that had accompanied the probe item. In Experiment 1, participants were either asked to prioritise a more valuable object in the array (serial position 1, 2, or 3) or to treat them all equally. Older adults exhibited worse overall memory performance but were as able as younger adults to prioritise objects. In both groups, this ability was particularly apparent at the middle serial position. Experiment 2 then explored whether younger and older adults’ prioritisation is affected by presentation time. Replicating Experiment 1, older adults were able to prioritise the more valuable object in working memory, showing equivalent benefits and costs as younger adults. However, processing speed, as indexed by presentation time, was shown not to limit strategic prioritisation in either age group. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that, although older adults have poorer visual working memory overall, the ability to strategically direct attention to more valuable items in working memory is preserved across ageing.
Highlights
Adult ageing is typically associated with relatively stable or increased crystallised intelligence
Despite the main effect of age in the present experiment, we suggest that the present requirement for recall appears to have elicited the same serial position effect in young adults, showing that the same vulnerability can be observed in young adults when using more challenging and sensitive performance measures
An important finding was that both age groups were able to prioritise information in visual working memory
Summary
Adult ageing is typically associated with relatively stable or increased crystallised intelligence Older adults may store and/or recall information with less resolution or precision, which has been shown to be more problematic with larger arrays (Ko et al, 2014; Noack et al, 2012; Peich et al, 2013; Pertzov et al, 2015) Another hypothesis is that older adults have poorer working memory due to reduced executive attentional capacity (Braver & West, 2008; Reuter-Lorenz & Lustig, 2016), with visuo-spatial executive functioning accounting for significant variance in older adults’ visual working memory capacity (Brown et al, 2012). A further possibility is that visual working memory undergoes lifespan changes in separate systems responsible for the formation of representations, and their active maintenance (Ozimič & Repovš, 2020) Under this approach, healthy ageing is associated with declines both in the ability to establish a distinct number of visual representations and in actively maintaining all or some of these representations following their offset from the environment. The benefits that are observed for such items are vulnerable to different forms of attentional interference, both in the form of executive-attentional load and perceptual interference from the environment (see Hitch et al, 2020, for a review)
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