Intact Episodic Retrieval in Older Adults: Evidence From an Auditory Negative Priming Task

Abstract

Background/Study Context: The negative priming effect has been traditionally interpreted as the inhibitory aftereffect of distractor processing. According to inhibitory deficit theory, older adults should be more impaired by auditory distractors. Recent studies have shown that episodic retrieval processes are involved in the effect. However, so far there is no direct evidence that this is true for older adults.

Methods: In an auditory four-alternative identification task, young adults (18–30 years), younger seniors (60–67 years), and older seniors (68–78 years) identified target sounds while ignoring distractor sounds. In ignored repetition trials, the prime distractor was repeated as the probe target, whereas there was no stimulus repetition in control trials. Reaction times and errors were analyzed.

Results: Negative priming was present in all age groups. Senior groups showed increased negative priming in reaction times. All age groups revealed a comparable increase of probe errors with the former prime response in ignored repetition compared with control trials. There was no age difference in the frequency of responding with the former prime response in control trials.

Conclusion: An increase in prime response errors in ignored repetition trials is consistent with the involvement of episodic retrieval processes in negative priming in younger and older adults. Inconsistent with both an inhibitory account of negative priming and the inhibitory deficit theory of cognitive aging, older adults neither showed evidence of reduced negative priming nor of impaired restraint control.

Notes

¹One of these memory-limiting variables is the temporal discriminability of the to-be-retrieved memory trace at the time of retrieval (Baddeley, 1990). Temporal discriminability of the prime episode at the time of the probe presentation increases the negative priming effect (Mayr & Buchner, 2006; Neill et al., 1992). Another variable is the contextual similarity between encoding and retrieval episode (Tulving, 1983). The more similar the two episodes, the better is the retrieval performance (Godden & Baddeley, 1975). Correspondingly, several studies have demonstrated that the negative priming effect is larger when prime and probe presentations have a similar context (Chao, 2009; Fox & de Fockert, 1998; Neill, 1997; Stolz & Neely, 2001; but see Wong, 2000).

²Note that control trials do not comprise any stimulus repetition between prime and probe and, hence, prime response repetitions cannot be the result of a response retrieval process cued by the probe target.

Note. Means, standard deviations, and ranges (in parentheses) for additional descriptive measures.

^a Self-assessments were to be made relative to the own age group. Response categories for the self-report items were “very good,” “good,” “bad/very bad.” The “very bad” category was used by only one participant in one self-assessment item and was therefore merged with the “bad” category. For the fourth item (i.e., self-assessed overall contentment with life), the response categories were changed to “very happy,” “happy,” “unhappy/very unhappy.” Depicted are the mode responses and the proportion of participants that responded with the mode response (in parentheses).

^b Depicted is the proportion of participants that reported to take medication.

³Prime responses and prime error rates were also analyzed. As expected, no effects of trial type were found. There were only effects of age group indicating faster responses and less errors for the young participant group as compared to the senior groups.

⁴Note that while this type of analysis is preferable on methodological grounds, the statistical conclusions would have been the same had we used the standard ANOVA F statistic.

*Ignored repetition trials: Incorrect responses using the key that was assigned to the nonpresented stimulus. Control trials: Incorrect prime distractor responses.

Note. Standard deviations are presented in parentheses.