Tran Tammy T, Madore Kevin P, Tobin Kaitlyn E, Block Sophia H, Puliyadi Vyash, Hsu Shaw C, Preston Alison R, Bakker Arnold, Wagner Anthony D
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2025 Mar 28. doi: 10.3758/s13415-025-01292-2.
Episodic memory enables the encoding and retrieval of novel associations, as well as the bridging across learned associations to draw novel inferences. A fundamental goal of memory science is to understand the factors that give rise to individual and age-related differences in memory-dependent cognition. Variability in episodic memory could arise, in part, from both individual differences in sustained attention and diminished attention in aging. We first report that, relative to young adults (N = 23; M = 20.0 years), older adults (N = 26, M = 68.7 years) demonstrated lower associative memory and memory-guided associative inference performance and that this age-related reduction in associative inference occurs even when controlling for associative memory performance. Next, we confirm these age-related memory differences by using a high-powered, online replication study (young adults: N = 143, M = 26.2 years; older adults N = 133, M = 67.7 years), further demonstrating that age-related differences in memory do not reflect group differences in sustained attention (as assayed by the gradual-onset continuous performance task; gradCPT). Finally, we report that individual differences in sustained attention explain between-person variability in associative memory and inference performance in the present, online young adult sample, but not in the older adult sample. These findings extend understanding of the links between attention and memory in young adults, demonstrating that differences in sustained attention was related to differences in memory-guided inference. By contrast, our data suggest that the present age-related differences in memory-dependent behavior and the memory differences between older adults are due to attention-independent mechanisms.
情景记忆能够对新的关联进行编码和检索，还能在已学关联之间建立联系以得出新的推断。记忆科学的一个基本目标是了解导致记忆依赖认知中个体差异和年龄相关差异的因素。情景记忆的变异性可能部分源于持续注意力的个体差异以及衰老过程中注意力的下降。我们首先报告，相对于年轻人（N = 23；平均年龄M = 20.0岁），老年人（N = 26，平均年龄M = 68.7岁）表现出较低的联想记忆和记忆引导的联想推理能力，而且即使在控制了联想记忆表现的情况下，这种与年龄相关的联想推理能力下降依然存在。接下来，我们通过一项大规模的在线重复研究（年轻人：N = 143，平均年龄M = 26.2岁；老年人N = 133，平均年龄M = 67.7岁）证实了这些与年龄相关的记忆差异，进一步表明记忆方面的年龄相关差异并不反映持续注意力方面的组间差异（通过渐显式连续性能任务；gradCPT进行测定）。最后，我们报告在当前的在线年轻成人样本中，持续注意力的个体差异解释了个体在联想记忆和推理表现上的人际变异性，但在老年成人样本中并非如此。这些发现扩展了我们对年轻人注意力与记忆之间联系的理解，表明持续注意力的差异与记忆引导的推理差异有关。相比之下，我们的数据表明，当前与年龄相关的记忆依赖行为差异以及老年成年人之间的记忆差异是由注意力独立机制导致的。
