Our ability to learn and remember declines as we age, and these changes can have wide-spread effects on our day-to-day activities. They may affect our sense of well-being or the quality of our social relationships, for example.
Importantly, age-related changes in memory are not uniform. For example, whereas semantic memory, involving the knowledge of general facts, seems to hold relatively steady into old age, episodic memory, or memory of information related to specific personal events in a person's life, seems to decline more quickly, even in healthy older adults without dementia-related disorders.
It is important to adequately assess memory deficits associated with normal aging, differentiate these deficits from pathological changes, and consider potential remedial action. All of these goals require a mechanistic understanding of what causes age-related episodic memory changes.
One currently influential hypothesis blames such deficits on a failure to associate and bind together the different components of an episode during memory encoding (i.e., when first attempting to commit information to memory), as well as in the ability to access the bound components during memory retrieval.
This associative-deficit hypothesis can explain a large number of results from laboratory studies on memory and aging, but also typical real-life observations. For example, older adults often complain about problems with retrieving names of familiar people — which can easily be explained as a deficit in binding together someone's face with their name.
Another common observation is that some older adults tend to repeat their stories. This may be due to the fact that the association of the story-telling event with the person to whom it had been told is not adequately represented.
Thus, in each of these examples it is not necessarily the individual pieces that are missing. Rather, it is the connections between them that may become increasingly fragile as we age.
The exploration of this age-related associative memory decline is the common theme of a special issue of Psychology and Aging, edited by Moshe Naveh-Benjamin (University of Missouri) and Ulrich Mayr (University of Oregon).
The issue contains a collection of 17 articles from some of the foremost scholars in memory and aging. The contributions explore the potential mechanisms behind associative memory deficits and ways to counteract them. The contributions also draw on different theoretical perspectives to explain age-related changes in associative memory — including some that are critical of the associative-deficit hypothesis. Most of the studies focus on normative/healthy aging, but several of them also contain insights that are potentially applicable to disorders and pathologies.
We can list here only a few of the highlights.
For example, an article by Maylor and Badham, indicates the importance of circadian rhythms for age differences in associative memory performance: Older adults' associative memory deficit is the largest when they are tested at their non-optimal times and younger adults are tested at their optimal times (afternoon and evening).
An article by Brubaker and Naveh-Benjamin shows that associative memory is particularly susceptible to stereotype threat, a concept often discussed in the social psychology literature. The article demonstrates that instructions to participants that are intended to potentially create or eliminate age-related stereotype threats (by telling them ahead of time whether older adults are doing well or poorly on those tasks) can modulate older adults' associative memory deficit (for example, the ability to remember what name is associated with a given face), whereas the memory for the components themselves (the separate name and face) is not affected. The authors argue that the stereotype threat focuses older adults' attention on the stereotype, using up working memory resources that would otherwise be applied to the associative memory task.
Several articles extend previous results in showing that older adults' associative episodic memory can be improved by relying on support of semantic memory, a type of memory that seems to hold on in old age.
For example, Amer, Giovanello, Grady, and Hasher show that older adults can improve their associative memory performance to the level of younger adults when the association between a product and its price is based on prior knowledge and real-world realistic price (in contrast to unrealistic).
Related to the potential ways to improve older adults' memory, Anderson, Ebert, Grady and Jennings assess the effects of an extended 9-day repetition lag training (learning to recognize that an item is new and did not appear on the original list, and be able to retain this information over longer periods of time) on the elimination of age-related deficits in source memory (remembering whether an item appeared visually or auditorily). Their results show that the benefit of such training extends for three months after training has ended. Interestingly, the training seems to have specific effects on the trained association (e.g., between word and the modality in which it was presented, auditory or visual) but does not seem to transfer to the remembering of associations in other tasks.
A study reported by Horn, Kennedy, and Rodrigue looks at participants' subjective memory complaints in a lifespan sample and how they are related to observed memory performance. Interestingly, the subjective complaints were a particularly strong predictor of performance in the face-name associative task for the older adults with the APOE E4 genetic risk group, and these complaints were more frequent in men with higher beta-amyloid deposition, potentially indicating that subjective reports may provide a marker for an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease.
Aging-related decline in memory remains a complex phenomenon. However, the articles in this special issue demonstrate that research regarding age-related changes in associative memory has produced a wealth of critical insights and point towards important directions for further progress.
Special Issue
- View the table of contents with abstracts on APA PsycNET
- Purchase the special issue
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Note: This article is in the Developmental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Developmental Psychology topic area.