A hallmark of aging is a decline in episodic memory that is especially pronounced for memory for associations. To examine the neurocognitive mechanisms, young and older adults completed an item encoding task involving a semantic judgment on individual objects and an associative encoding task involving a judgment whether one of two objects could fit into the other, while their EEG was recorded. Item and associative recognition were equally reduced in older adults, unexpectedly yielding no disproportionate age-related associative deficit. A behavioral follow-up experiment did reveal an associative deficit when item and associative memory were both tested for the stimuli encoded in an easier version of the associative task, although this effect tended to be smaller than the deficit in an interactive imagery task. The behavioral and ERP results together suggest that in the item task, older adults failed to bind together perceptual object features, leading to low item memory performance. In the association task, both age groups engaged shallow, perceptual encoding processes, which appeared to be less efficient in older adults. These results suggest that the age-related associative deficit is modulated by the extent to which both item and associative memory depend on low-level feature binding and higher-level strategic processes.

衰老的标志是情节记忆的下降，这对于联想记忆尤为明显。为了检查神经认知机制，年轻人和老年人完成了一项编码任务，其中涉及对单个对象的语义判断，并且完成了关联的编码任务，其中涉及判断两个对象中的一个是否适合另一个对象，同时记录了他们的脑电图。老年人的项目和联想识别同样降低，出乎意料的是没有出现与年龄相关的联想缺陷。一项行为跟进实验确实显示了项目和联想记忆均针对联想任务较容易版本中编码的刺激进行测试时的联想缺陷，尽管这种效果往往小于互动影像任务中的联想缺陷。行为和ERP结果一起表明，在项任务中，老年人未能将感知对象特征绑定在一起，从而导致项内存性能低下。在联想任务中，两个年龄段的人都进行了浅层的，可感知的编码过程，这似乎在老年人中效率较低。这些结果表明，与年龄相关的联想缺陷受项目和联想记忆都依赖于低级特征绑定和高级策略过程的程度调节。