Hyper-Binding: A Unique Age Effect

Previous work has shown that older adults encode lexical and semantic information about verbal distractors and use that information to facilitate performance on subsequent tasks. In this study, we investigated whether older adults also form associations between distractors and co-occurring targets....

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPsychological science Vol. 21; no. 3; pp. 399 - 405
Main Authors Campbell, Karen L., Hasher, Lynn, Thomas, Ruthann C.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.03.2010
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Adolescent
Adult
Adult education
Age
Age differences
Aged
Ageing
Aging
Aging - psychology
Association Learning
Attention
Cognition
Comorbidity
Computer memory
Confidence interval
Cues
Decision making
Distraction
Experimental psychology
Female
Humans
Inhibition, Psychological
Male
Memory
Memory disorders
Mental Recall
Middle Aged
Older adults
Older people
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Reading
Seller financing
Semantics
Studies
Task performance
Visual task performance
Words
Young Adult
Young adults
inhibition
attention
binding
aging
associative memory
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Summary:Previous work has shown that older adults encode lexical and semantic information about verbal distractors and use that information to facilitate performance on subsequent tasks. In this study, we investigated whether older adults also form associations between distractors and co-occurring targets. In two experiments, participants performed a I-back task on pictures superimposed with irrelevant words; 10 min later, participants were given a paired-associates memory task without reference to the I -back task. The study list included preserved and re-paired (disrupted) pairs from the I-back task. Older adults showed a memory advantage for preserved pairs and a disadvantage for disrupted pairs, whereas younger adults performed similarly across pair types. These results suggest the existence of a hyper-binding phenomenon in which older adults encode seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment and transfer this knowledge to subsequent tasks. This increased knowledge of how events covary may be the reason why real-world decision-making ability is retained, or even enhanced, with age.
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ISSN:0956-7976
1467-9280
DOI:10.1177/0956797609359910