The effects of reduced attentional resources on memory for associative information

The present series of experiments examined how aging and divided attention influence memory for item and associative information in a variety of contexts. Previous research has suggested that one reason for older adults' poorer episodic memory is an impairment in processing and retaining associative information. To examine this, older adults, younger adults, and younger adults under various divided attention conditions studied unrelated word pairs for a later recognition memory test of both single words and different combinations of word pairs (Experiments 1-3). Both older and younger divided attention adults performed less well than the full attention group, with the deficit in associative information being greater than the deficit in item information. In addition, a differentially greater associative impairment was found for the older adults, as shown by their heightened tendency to make false alarm responses to re-paired (conjunction) distracters. These findings are interpreted in a dual-process model of recognition memory, in which older adults rely more on familiarity rather than recollection when processing associative information. The ability to remember other types of associative information was further examined by using cued recall tests of associative memory that varied in terms of the degree of specificity. In these experiments (Experiments 4-6), participants studied items that were paired with either related or unrelated units of information, as well as specific numerical information (either quantity or price information). Although older adults had the greatest difficulty remembering specific arbitrary associations, this impairment was reduced when associations were made meaningful (as a result of expertise) or contained a certain degree of schematic support. These results are discussed in terms of how prior knowledge and evaluative processing can influence associative memory, and suggest that a framework of associative memory that emphasizes different levels of associative specificity is necessary to interpret how older adults access associative information. The overall pattern of results imply that observations of age-related differences in memory for associative information depend on differences in available attentional resources, grain size (degree of precision) analyses at both encoding and retrieval, schematic support, and the meaningfulness and specificity of the association., The purpose of the present research was to test the notion that divided attention interferes with the processing of associative information, and that as a result, memory performance for items as well as the relations among these items is impaired relative to full attention situations. Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants under divided attention are more likely to report recombined word pairs as previously seen word pairs, compared to participants under conditions of full attention. Experiment 2 revealed that the processing of contextual information is impaired under divided attention. The idea that reduced elaboration and reduced use of associative information mediates poor memory performance under conditions of divided attention was examined in Experiment 3. The series of experiments suggests that although the processing of associative information is disrupted under conditions of divided attention, other mechanisms also contribute to impair memory performance when attentional resources are reduced.