Existing knowledge of linguistic structure mitigates associative memory deficits in older adults.

Unlabelled: Background/Study Context: Older adults show lower memory performance than younger adults when a task requires them to create associations (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1170-1187). In this study, associative memory was examined in order to assess whether age differences in performance were mitigated when the word pairs to be learned utilized a familiar pattern seen in everyday language (adjective-noun), which we propose as a type of schematic support that capitalizes upon linguistic structure.

Methods: Thirty older (66-87 years old) and younger (18-22 years old) adults from the University of Missouri and the surrounding community studied word pairs in noun-noun, adjective-noun, and noun-adjective sequences.

DRYAD and ADH: Further comments on explaining age-related differences in memory.

Recently, Smyth and Naveh-Benjamin (2016) questioned some of the main assumptions/hypotheses of DRYAD (or density of representations yields age-related deficits), a global-deficit model of aging and memory judgments (Benjamin, 2010; Benjamin et al., 2012). Smyth and Naveh-Benjamin (2016) provided empirical evidence that seems incompatible with DRYAD, but that fits the associative deficit hypothesis (ADH; Naveh-Benjamin, 2000), 1 specific-deficit theoretical view.

Can DRYAD explain age-related associative memory deficits?

A recent interesting theoretical account of aging and memory judgments, the DRYAD (density of representations yields age-related deficits; Benjamin, 2010; Benjamin, Diaz, Matzen, & Johnson, 2012), attributes the extensive findings of disproportional age-related deficits in memory for source, context, and associations, to a global decline in memory fidelity. It is suggested that this global deficit, possibly due to a decline in attentional processes, is moderated by weak representation of contextual information to result in disproportional age-related declines. In the current article, we evaluate the DRYAD model, comparing it to specific age-related deficits theories, in particular, the ADH (associative deficit hypothesis, Naveh-Benjamin, 2000).

Aging and implicit learning: explorations in contextual cuing.

In contextual cuing, faster responses are made to repeated displays containing context-target associations than to novel displays without such covariances. We report that healthy older adults showed learning impairments in contextual cuing when compared with younger adults. The display properties in the task were altered to artificially increase younger adults' response times to match those of older adults and to produce faster responses in older participants; however, younger participants' learning remained intact, whereas older participants continued to show impairments under these conditions.

Awareness in contextual cuing with extended and concurrent explicit tests.

The term contextual cuing refers to improved visual search performance with repeated exposure to a configuration of objects. Participants use predictive cues-derived from learned associations between target locations and the spatial arrangement of the surrounding distractors in a configuration--to efficiently guide search behavior. Researchers have claimed that contextual cuing can occur implicitly.