The Impact of Semantic Relatedness on Associative Memory in Aging Depending on the Semantic Relationships between the Memoranda

ABSTRACT

Background: Aging is characterized by a decline in associative memory. However, under some conditions, such as in the presence of semantic relatedness within the association, the age-related associative decline can be attenuated. In this study, we evaluated whether the nature of the semantic relationship between the memoranda (taxonomic versus thematic) could modulate the impact of semantic relatedness on older adults’ associative memory.

Methods: We assessed 40 young adults and 40 older adults’ associative memory for associations that were either taxonomically-related, thematically-related, or unrelated.

Results: While the main results showed age-related differences in all associative memory tasks without attenuation by semantic relatedness, the results after excluding 4 outlier older participants suggest that older adults’ associative memory performance did not differ from that of young adults for thematically-related pairs, while there was an age-related difference in associative memory for taxonomically-related pairs as well as for unrelated pairs.

Discussion: This could suggest that the nature of the semantic relationship between the memoranda can modulate the impact of semantic relatedness on older adults’ associative memory performance, although the reason why this is not the case for all older participants still needs to be understood.

Highlights

• Older adults display a decline in associative memory performance for arbitrary associations

• The age-related associative memory difference disappears for thematically-related associations, but not for taxonomically related ones.

• This pattern was not present in 4 older adults outlier to the distribution, that did not take advantage from thematic relationships in associative memory. The reason for this result still needs to be understood.

Disclosure statement

Emma Delhaye, Adrien Folville and Christine Bastin declare that they have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. Because Levene’s test was significant (p < .05), suggesting a violation of the equal variance assumption for the thematic relatedness condition, we also ran non-parametric mean comparison analysis on this measure, which showed comparable results: W = 1071, p < .01, rank biserial correlation = .34, CI [0.01, 0.12].

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Liege, the Léon Frédéricq Foundation, the Alzheimer Research Foundation (SAO-FRA; grant S#14003), the Wallonia Brussels Federation Special Funds for Research (grant #FSRC-14/11), the Fund for Research in Human Science and the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRESH/FRS-FNRS), and the Inter-University Attraction Pole P7/11.