Can emotional content reduce the age gap in visual working memory? Evidence from two tasks

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology of Aging

Background:

• Aging is linked to cognitive declines, particularly in working memory (WM).
• Understanding factors that mitigate age-related cognitive differences is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if emotional information impacts the age gap in visual working memory (WM).
• To assess the effect of emotional stimuli on the quantity and quality of visual WM representations across age groups.

Main Methods:

• Young and older adults participated in serial image recognition (SIR) and color-image binding (CIB) tasks.
• Performance was evaluated based on image recognition accuracy and recall precision for visual stimuli.

Main Results:

• Older adults performed worse on negative images in the SIR task, increasing the age gap in WM.
• Recall precision in the CIB task was lower in older adults, indicating age-related decline in WM representation quality.
• Positive images showed a trend towards improving precision, but this effect was uniform across age groups.

Conclusions:

• Emotional content, including positive images, did not effectively reduce the age gap in visual working memory.
• Age-related differences in visual WM quantity and quality persist, irrespective of emotional valence of stimuli.