Memory and automatic processing of valuable information in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT

People often engage in the selective remembering of valuable or important information, whether strategic and/or automatic. We examined potential age-related differences in the automatic processing of value during encoding on later remembering by presenting participants with words paired with point values (range: 1–10 twice or 1–20) to remember for a later test. On the first three lists, participants were told that they would receive the points associated with each word if they recalled it on the test (their goal was to maximize their score). On the last three lists, we told participants that all words were worth the same number of points if recalled on the tests, thus making the point value paired with each word meaningless. Results revealed that selective memory may be impaired in older adults using procedures with larger value ranges. Additionally, we demonstrated that the automatic effects of value may have a greater effect on younger adults relative to older adults, but there may be instances where older adults also exhibit these automatic effects. Finally, strategic and automatic processes may not be related within each learner, suggesting that these processes may rely on different cognitive mechanisms. This indicates that these processes could be underpinned by distinct cognitive mechanisms: strategic processes might engage higher-level cognitive operations like imagery, while automatic processes appear to be more perceptually driven.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• aging
• value-directed remembering
• automatic processing
• strategic processing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Again, an examination of the average time spent on the self-paced free recall tests indicated that older adults (M = 64.70 seconds, SD = 35.50) spent more time recalling words than younger adults (M = 47.60 seconds, SD = 19.06), [t(95) = 3.00, p = .003, d = .61], possibly explaining similar total recall across age groups.

2. There were still age-related differences in time spent recalling the words in both Experiment 2a and 2b [both ps < .005], with older adults spending longer than younger adults.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health [National Institute on Aging; Award Number R01 AG044335 to Alan Castel]. The authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript. The experiments reported in this article were not formally preregistered, but the stimuli and data are available on the Open Science Framework https://osf.io/4bxyj/?view_only=5d7283ef70f14dbf8b7144ad3b4e51b6.