Interfering with remembering and knowing: effects of divided attention at retrieval

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Human Aging Research

Background:

• Memory retrieval involves distinct processes: recollection and familiarity.
• Understanding the cognitive resources these processes consume is crucial for explaining memory performance across the lifespan.
• Attention plays a significant role in memory retrieval, but its specific impact on recollection versus familiarity is not fully elucidated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the cognitive resource requirements of recollection and familiarity memory processes during retrieval.
• To examine how divided attention affects these memory processes in younger and older adults.
• To differentiate the attentional demands of recollection and familiarity.

Main Methods:

• A Remember-Know paradigm was employed with younger and older adults.
• Participants studied a word list and underwent an auditory recognition test, classifying items as Remembered, Known, or New.
• Retrieval was tested under full attention or divided attention (DA) conditions, using either a digit or an animacy task.

Main Results:

• Both younger and older adults exhibited increased false Remember responses under both divided attention conditions, indicating attention's role in illusory recollection.
• Decreased accuracy in Know responses was observed in both age groups, but specifically during the word-based divided attention task, suggesting a material-specific effect on familiarity.
• Aging was linked to reduced accuracy in Remember responses and increased response latencies on distracting tasks under divided attention.

Conclusions:

• Avoiding false recollective responses during retrieval necessitates attentional resources.
• Accurate familiarity-based responses depend on the reactivation of content-specific representations.
• Distinct cognitive resource profiles underlie recollection and familiarity, with differential impacts of attention and aging.