Younger and older adults’ associative memory for medication interactions of varying severity

ABSTRACT

While older adults face various deficits in binding items in memory, they are often able to remember information that is deemed important. In Experiment 1, we examined how younger and older adults remember medication interactions of varying severity. There were no age differences in overall memory accuracy, but older adults’ performance depended on the severity of the interactions (such that the interactions associated with the most severe health outcomes were remembered most accurately) while younger adults’ did not. In Experiment 2, a similar task was designed to create interference in memory. Even with this more difficult task there were no age differences in recall accuracy, and both age groups remembered the interactions with the severe outcomes most accurately. These findings suggest that, under certain circumstances, older adults do not face deficits in associative recognition accuracy of information that varies in importance.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• cognitive aging
• learning

Acknowledgements

We thank Tyson Kerr, Jacqueline Nguyen, and Kristin Taylor for their assistance with experimental design and data collection. We also thank Robert Bjork, Barbara Knowlton, Doug Bell, Catherine Middlebrooks, and Alexander Siegel for their helpful comments regarding this project. Portions of this research were presented at the 20th Annual UCLA Research Conference on Aging and the 16th Biennial Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, GA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mary B. Hargis http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0725-9042

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and National Institute on Aging, Award Number R01AG044335.