Abstract

Objectives

It is well known that age differentially impacts aspects of long-term episodic memory (EM): Whereas a binding deficit indicates that older adults are less capable than younger adults to encode or retrieve associations between information (e.g., the pairing between two memoranda, such as lock – race), item memory is relatively intact (e.g., recognizing lock without its original pairing).

Method

We tested whether this deficit could be corrected by facilitating establishment of the bindings in working memory (WM) through adapting the semantic relatedness of studied pairs according to participants’ ongoing performance (Experiments 1 and 2). We also examined whether this was evident for the long-term retention of pairs that were not tested in WM (Experiment 2).

Results

The results revealed matched binding and item memory in WM and EM between age groups. Most importantly, older adults required increased semantic strength between word pairs to achieve similar performance to that of younger adults, regardless of whether pairs were immediately tested during the WM task.

Discussion

These findings indicate that relying on their superior semantic memory can correct the commonly exhibited profound deficit in binding memory in older age.

中文翻译：

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语义相关性纠正了工作记忆和情节记忆中与年龄相关的绑定缺陷。

摘要

目标

众所周知，年龄会影响长期情景记忆（EM）的各个方面：有约束力的缺陷表明，老年人比年轻人具有较小的能力来编码或检索信息之间的关联（例如，两个备忘录之间的配对，例如作为lock – race），项目内存相对完整（例如，识别出没有原始配对的锁）。

方法

我们测试了这种缺陷是否可以通过根据参与者的持续表现来适应研究对的语义相关性来促进建立工作记忆（WM）中的绑定而得到纠正（实验1和2）。我们还检查了这对于WM中未测试的对的长期保留是否明显（实验2）。

结果

结果显示年龄组之间在WM和EM中匹配的绑定和项目记忆。最重要的是，老年人是否需要增强单词对之间的语义强度，以实现与年轻人相似的表现，而不管在WM任务期间是否立即测试了单词对。

讨论区

这些发现表明，依靠其优越的语义记忆力可以纠正老年人中通常表现出的绑定记忆力严重不足。