Aging and encoding in memory: false alarms and decision criteria in a word-pair recognition task

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Gerontology

Background:

• Age-related memory decline is a significant concern in gerontology.
• Distinctiveness of memory encoding is crucial for accurate recognition.
• Previous research suggests potential age-related deficits in memory processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate age-related deficits in the distinctiveness of memory encoding.
• To examine how false alarm rates and decision criteria change with age.
• To differentiate between memory strength and strategic compensation in older adults.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a false alarm recognition procedure with learning of highly associated word pairs.
• Observed false alarm rates and C decision criteria across three age groups: young adults, older adults, and older-older adults.
• Analyzed false alarms for both related and unrelated distractors to target items.

Main Results:

• No age differences were found in C decision criteria, suggesting memory strength failure rather than compensation.
• Older adults produced significantly more false alarms to related distractors compared to young adults.
• Older-older adults exhibited increased false alarms across all indexes, indicating a worsening encoding deficit.

Conclusions:

• Findings support the hypothesis of an age-related failure to encode target items distinctively.
• The observed increase in false alarms with age is likely due to diminished memory strength.
• Encoding deficits in memory appear to exacerbate in late adulthood, affecting older-older individuals most severely.