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Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
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Effortful semantic decision-making boosts memory performance in older adults.
Li Fu1, Joseph H R Maes1, Samarth Varma1
1a Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour , Radboud University , Nijmegen , The Netherlands.
Memory (Hove, England)
|June 3, 2016
Summary
Older adults can improve episodic memory (EM) by increasing cognitive effort and using deep processing during encoding. This strategy can fully compensate for age-related memory decline.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Gerontology
Background:
- Episodic memory (EM) decline is a significant concern in aging.
- Both resource and binding deficits contribute to age-related EM decline.
- Environmental support, like increased cognitive effort and deeper processing, may help compensate for these deficits.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how cognitive effort and level of processing (LoP) during encoding affect episodic memory retrieval in young and older adults.
- To identify factors that can counteract age-related episodic memory decline.
Main Methods:
- Young (N=23) and older (N=23) adults performed incidental encoding tasks (deep/semantic, shallow/perceptual) with four levels of cognitive effort.
- Episodic memory performance was assessed using a recognition task and indexed by d-prime.
Main Results:
- Increased cognitive effort enhanced episodic memory performance (d-prime) in both age groups, irrespective of LoP.
- Older adults showed lower d-prime than young adults after shallow encoding and deep encoding with low cognitive effort.
- Deep encoding combined with high cognitive effort eliminated age-related differences in episodic memory.
Conclusions:
- Cognitive effort and deep processing during encoding can effectively compensate for age-related episodic memory deficits.
- Findings support an environmental-compensatory account of cognitive aging.
- These results have potential therapeutic implications for enhancing memory in older adults.
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