Khoo Joshua Kah Meng, Tibon Roni
School of Psychology, University Park, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.
J Cogn. 2025 Jul 31;8(1):44. doi: 10.5334/joc.457. eCollection 2025.
Memory for episodic associations declines with ageing due to decreased recollection abilities. Unitization-the encoding of multiple items as one integrated entity-has been shown to support familiarity-based retrieval that is independent of recollection and is relatively preserved in healthy ageing. Accordingly, unitization has been proposed as a promising strategy to attenuate age-related associative deficits, but evidence regarding its utility was lacking. The current study aimed to establish unitization as a viable mnemonic strategy. First, to ensure that unitization can attenuate the age-related associative deficit for initially unrelated materials, top-down unitization was used. Namely, participants were given an initially unrelated word pair in the context of either a definition which allows the words to be encoded as a unitized compound or a sentence in which the words are encoded as separate entities. Second, to ensure that unitization can be used as a self-initiated strategy, participants also completed the task by generating their own binding information (definitions/sentences). As expected, a unitization effect had emerged, such that associative memory was enhanced following definition encoding. However, this effect only occurred when binding information was provided. Additionally, a general memory advantage for the self-generation condition had emerged, but this was (generally) similar across unitization conditions and age groups. Taken together, the results show that unitization can be used as a mnemonic strategy under certain conditions, and highlight additional steps that should be taken before it can be effectively used beyond lab settings.
由于回忆能力下降，情景联想记忆会随着年龄增长而衰退。单元化——将多个项目编码为一个整合实体——已被证明有助于基于熟悉度的检索，这种检索独立于回忆，并且在健康老龄化过程中相对得以保留。因此，单元化被提议作为一种有前景的策略来减轻与年龄相关的联想缺陷，但关于其效用的证据却很缺乏。当前的研究旨在确立单元化作为一种可行的记忆策略。首先，为确保单元化能够减轻与年龄相关的对最初不相关材料的联想缺陷，采用了自上而下的单元化方法。也就是说，在定义（该定义能使单词被编码为一个单元化的复合词）或句子（其中单词被编码为单独的实体）的背景下，给参与者呈现一对最初不相关的单词。其次，为确保单元化能够作为一种自我启动的策略，参与者还通过生成自己的关联信息（定义/句子）来完成任务。正如预期的那样，出现了单元化效应，即定义编码后联想记忆得到增强。然而，这种效应仅在提供关联信息时才会出现。此外，自我生成条件下出现了一般的记忆优势，但在单元化条件和年龄组中（总体上）是相似的。综合来看，结果表明单元化在某些条件下可以用作一种记忆策略，并突出了在其能够在实验室环境之外有效使用之前应采取的额外步骤。
