Examining the time course under which specific and gist episodic memory representation are established at encoding among young and older adults
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One of the most pervasive adult age-related declines in episodic memory is in the ability to remember associations between components of an episode, such as between a person and a location where the person was encountered, particularly at specific but not general/gist levels of representation. Yet, the reasons why older adults' episodic memory representations are less specific or detailed than those of younger adults remain to be fully elucidated. In the present study, across two experiments (with a combined n of 80 young and 86 older adults), I tested whether age-related differences in the speed of encoding specific and gist representations may in part explain these deficits. Participants encoded face-scene pairs under one of three rates (fast, intermediate, or slow) and were later administered conjoint recognition tests involving discriminating intact/studied pairs from similar and dissimilar pairs. Results, interpreted with a multinomial-processing-tree (MPT) model of specific and gist memory, showed that increases in encoding time resulted in consistent improvements in specific but not general representations among both young and older adults. Moreover, when older adults had even more time than younger adults to encode the face-scene pairs, the age deficits in specific representations disappeared, though the nature of the memory probe influenced whether this occurred. These results indicate that speed of processing at encoding appears to be one important factor in accounting for age differences in the representational specificity of episodic memories, but this mechanism likely interacts with other mechanisms, such as those at retrieval, to account for why older adults' episodic memories are representationally less specific than those of younger adults.
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Ph. D.