Department of Psychology, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Memory. 2021 Mar;29(3):406-415. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2021.1898645. Epub 2021 Mar 12.
According to the associative deficit hypothesis, older adults experience greater difficulty in remembering associations between pieces of information than young adults, despite their relatively intact memory for individual items. It has been demonstrated that this deficit could be simulated by depleting resources for relational processing. The current study examines the possible mechanisms underlying this simulation. Item and associative memory were assessed using a process dissociation paradigm in which word pairs were encoded under full attention (FA) or relational divided attention (DA) conditions across three groups: FA older adults ( = 24), FA young adults ( = 24), and DA young adults ( = 24). Recollection and familiarity were estimated for the associative memory performance. Relative to FA young adults, both older adults and DA young adults showed an associative deficit, and reduced use of recollection and high-level relational encoding strategies. Regression analyses suggested that the effects of age and DA on associative memory were largely driven by the variance in recollection and encoding strategy use. The results suggest that depletion of attentional resources for relational processing impairs associative memory through disrupting the use of effective encoding strategies and recollection, which largely simulates age-related associative deficit.
根据联想缺陷假说，老年人在记住信息片段之间的关联时比年轻人更困难，尽管他们对单个项目的记忆相对完整。已经证明，这种缺陷可以通过消耗关系处理资源来模拟。本研究探讨了这种模拟的潜在机制。使用过程分离范式评估项目和联想记忆，在该范式中，在三个组中（全注意条件下的 FA 老年人（n=24）、FA 年轻人（n=24）和关系分散注意条件下的 DA 年轻人（n=24））对单词对进行编码。对联想记忆表现进行回忆和熟悉度估计。与 FA 年轻人相比，老年人和 DA 年轻人都表现出联想缺陷，并且减少了回忆和高级关系编码策略的使用。回归分析表明，年龄和 DA 对联想记忆的影响主要归因于回忆和编码策略使用的差异。结果表明，关系处理注意力资源的消耗会通过破坏有效编码策略和回忆的使用来损害联想记忆，这在很大程度上模拟了与年龄相关的联想缺陷。
