Adult age differences in binding actors and actions in memory for events

Three experiments provide evidence for an age-related deficit in the binding of actors with their actions. Young and older adults were tested on their memory for a series of events, each involving an actor performing a simple action. Older adults had greater difficulty than did young adults at discr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Memory & cognition 2008, Vol.36 (1), p.119-131
Main Authors: Kersten, Alan W., Earles, Julie L., Curtayne, Eileen S., Lane, Jason C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Age differences
Age Factors
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Aging - physiology
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Cooperative Behavior
Experiments
Female
Hippocampus - physiology
Humans
Male
Memory
Middle Aged
Murders & murder attempts
Older people
Prefrontal Cortex - physiology
Psychology
Social Environment
Speech
Young adults
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Summary:Three experiments provide evidence for an age-related deficit in the binding of actors with their actions. Young and older adults were tested on their memory for a series of events, each involving an actor performing a simple action. Older adults had greater difficulty than did young adults at discriminating old events from novel conjunctions of familiar actors and actions, even when the two groups were equated on memory for each of those features in isolation by using a longer retention interval for young adults. These results are consistent with an age-related associative deficit linked to declines in hippocampal and prefrontal cortical functioning. They further provide evidence that age differences in source monitoring are not limited to speech acts but, rather, generalize to more complex actions. Finally, they provide evidence for age differences in susceptibility to conjunction memory errors, stemming from decreased reliance on recollection and increased reliance on familiarity with increased age. Example videos may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.
ISSN:0090-502X
1532-5946
DOI:10.3758/MC.36.1.119