Can emotional content reduce the age gap in visual working memory? Evidence from two tasks

ABSTRACT

Ageing is associated with declines in several cognitive abilities including working memory (WM). The goal of the present study was to assess whether emotional information could reduce the age gap in the quantity and quality (precision) of representations in visual WM. Young and older adults completed a serial image recognition (SIR) task and a colour-image binding (CIB) task. Results of the SIR task showed worse performance for negative than neutral and positive images within the older group, hence enlarging the age gap in WM. In the CIB task, recall precision was lower in the old than young adults, showing an ageing decline in the quality of WM representations. Positive images tended to improve precision, but this boost was similar for both age groups. In sum, emotional content did not reduce the age gap in visual WM.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual working memory
• emotion
• ageing
• memory precision
• valence

Acknowledgement

The research reported in this paper was derived from the master thesis submitted to the University of Zurich by the first author under the supervision of the second author. The authors declare the absence of any financial benefit or profit following directly from the application of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. One young participant had one trial with missing values, and another one had 2 additional negative trials at the expense of one neutral and one mixed trial.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich (project FK-13-083) to Alessandra S. Souza, and from a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation to the University Priority Program “Dynamics of healthy ageing”.