THE EFFECTS OF AGING ON ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY FOR SOCIALLY MEANINGFUL INFORMATION

Abstract

An extensive body of research exists detailing the decline in memory that occurs with healthy aging. Specifically, episodic memory has been shown to degrade over time in a wealth of paradigms varying in retrieval methods and cognitive load. One type of episodic memory that is particularly impaired with age is associative memory. Recent research investigating the discrepancies between memory for single items of information and memory for the association of such items has led to the Associative Deficit Hypothesis (ADH). Though this research has been extended to social associations such as face-name pairs, no studies to date have explored how personally meaningful social information at encoding impacts recognition. Our study aimed to address how aging affects memory for socially meaningful information using a face-word association. Younger and older adults were asked to encode three conditions of associative pairs (non-social, names, and traits) and their memory was immediately tested in a yes-no recognition task. Signal detection measures were used to explore recognition accuracy and decision making processes. Testing effects of age on hits, false alarms, discrimination and response bias measures revealed that associative memory was not preserved for the socially meaningful condition (traits) in older adults. Rather, the non-social condition enhanced hit rates across both age groups. Participants also better discriminated socially meaningful stimuli in comparison to social only (name) stimuli, however this finding was marginal, while response bias analyses revealed that young and older adults adopted a more conservative decision criterion for socially meaningful pairs, compared to social and non-social pairs. The implications of these findings are discussed and potential pitfalls in the methodology that could be addressed in future research are considered.