Effects of ageing on associative memory for related and unrelated pictures

Abstract

Associative memory deficits are pervasive with age. Memory for complex pictures, however, also seems to require the association of several scene elements into one representation, but picture memory is often age-invariant. We speculated that the natural relationships contained in pictures may explain this distinction and that memory for scenes with unusual novel relationships would be affected with ageing. In three experiments, we found that, counter to our predictions, the relatedness of scene elements exerted little influence on picture memory and did not differentially affect older compared to younger adults. These data suggest that the semantically rich associations contained in pictures need not rely on prior knowledge and experiences in order to support age-invariant picture memory. Our results indicate that associative memory for complex pictures may differ from memory for interitem associations, which may be more affected by ageing.

Keywords:

• Ageing
• Associative memory
• Picture memory
• Recognition
• Relatedness

Acknowledgements

Grant support from the National Institute on Aging (R01 AG006265 and P50 AG011715; awarded to DCP) and a seed grant from the Center on Aging and Cognition: Health, Education, and Training (awarded to AHG) supported this research, and funds from Brandeis University supported the preparation of this manuscript. We thank Julie Hautamaki, Siva Sethuraman, Laura Rallo, and Nora Goudsmit for experimental assistance. We also thank John Henderson's laboratory at Michigan State University for making some of their stimuli available on their website.

Notes

¹The other alternative would have been to calculate A′ scores with the hit rate that matched the encoding condition (e.g., using the related hit rate for the RR-U condition). When A′ scores are calculated with these hit rates, the pattern of significant main effects and interactions is unaffected.