The impact of item encoding mechanisms on associative memory in young and older adults

• Applicant: Professorin Siri-Maria Kamp, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 497854939

As humans grow older, they typically show a reduction in episodic memory performance. This reduction is especially strong for memory for connections between pieces of information, that is, for associations. An age-related change in the generation and application of strategies during associative encoding is discussed in the literature as a factor that leads to this age-related associative memory deficit. Prior investigations of this idea have concentrated primarily on strategies, which aim at the generation of relational connections between pieces of information (e.g., the generation of a sentence to learn word pairs or interactive imagery to learn object pairs), with partially inconsistent result patterns. By contrast, prior theories have largely neglected a potential relevance of mechanisms of encoding individual pieces of information that compose an association. The planned project tests the hypothesis that during learning of stimulus pairs, older adults show a strengthened focus on the encoding of perceptual stimulus features, instead of encoding individual stimuli semantically and associatively, like young adults. Since this provides a non-optimal basis for forming new associations with other stimuli, this age related change in strategic focus of encoding leads to a reduction of associative memory performance in older adults. Four experiments test this hypothesis by experimentally manipulating the demands on encoding perceptual stimulus information in associative memory tasks. To capture the mechanisms of memory encoding, the “frontal slow wave” subsequent memory effect (SME) in the EEG is used as an indicator for elaborative item encoding, and the early parietal SME is used as an indicator of more superficial, perceptual encoding processes. According to our overarching hypothesis, learning situations, in which the processing of perceptual stimulus information is less resource consuming or that stimulate a relatively weak strategic focus on perceptual stimulus processing, lead to a strengthened focus on elaborative encoding of stimulus information and to higher associative memory performance in older adults, which in turn leads to a reduction of the age-related associative memory deficit.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants