Effects of Aging on Associative Memory for Related and Unrelated Pictures

Associative memory deficits are pervasive with age. Memory for complex pictures, however, also seems to require the association of several scene elements into one representation, but picture memory is often age-invariant. We speculated that the natural relationships contained in pictures may explain this distinction and that memory for scenes with unusual novel relationships would be affected with aging. In three experiments, we found that, counter to our predictions, the relatedness of scene elements exerted little influence on picture memory and did not differentially affect older compared to younger adults. These data suggest that the semantically rich associations contained in pictures need not rely on prior knowledge and experiences in order to support age-invariant picture memory. Our results indicate that associative memory for complex pictures may differ from memory for inter-item associations, which may be more affected by aging.