Adult age differences in episodic memory: further support for an associative-deficit hypothesis

This study further tested an associative-deficit hypothesis (ADH; M. Naveh-Benjamin, 2000), which attributes a substantial part of older adults' deficient episodic memory performance to their difficulty in merging unrelated attributes-units of an episode into a cohesive unit. First, the results of 2 experiments replicate those observed by M. Naveh-Benjamin (2000) showing that older adults are particularly deficient in memory tests requiring associations. Second, the results extend the type of stimuli (pictures) under which older adults show this associative deficit. Third, the results support an ADH in that older adults show less of an associative deficit when the components of the episodes used are already connected in memory, thereby facilitating their encoding and retrieval. Finally, a group of younger adults who encoded the information under divided-attention conditions did not show this associative deficit.