This proposal develops several models of memory judgments that assume a purely global deficit in memory fidelity in older subjects. Unlike extant accounts of age-related changes in recognition, they make no assertions about selective deficits in memory processes or systems. The performance of the models -- and thus their consequent faithfulness in reproducing the memory acts of human rememberers -- derives from their implementation of three interrelated hypotheses: (1) a global deficit, which asserts that the memory deficit associated with aging is nonselective;(2) representational sparsity, which proposes that information in the environment that is less central to the perceiver's tasks, goals, or attentional biases is represented less densely than is goal-relevant, perceptually salient, or attention-capturing information;and (3) representational nonspecificity, which suggests that the fundamental operations that govern the encoding of information in memory do not differ for items and contexts, nor for the associative or relational information that binds them. Implications of these hypotheses for the effects of perceptual and attentional manipulations on age-related deficits in memory for context will be tested in Experiments 1-15, and the models will be benchmarked via the results of these experiments and a number of additional but conceptually central findings concerning the effects of age on recognition. The models will be extended to three additional paradigms involving memory judgments: exclusion, associative recognition, and false recognition, and implications of how the models address these four paradigms are tested in Experiments 16-27. These models are the first to provide a unified account of memory performance across these paradigms, and their failures should prove as informative as its successes. To the degree that the models cannot account for the results of prior work and the current experiments, it will help illuminate the specific nature of the age-related deficit in memory, and will thus guide additional theoretical and practical work in understanding and ameliorating those deficits.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Aging (NIA)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01AG026263-05
Application #
7846844
Study Section
Cognition and Perception Study Section (CP)
Program Officer
Wagster, Molly V
Project Start
2006-06-01
Project End
2013-05-31
Budget Start
2010-06-01
Budget End
2013-05-31
Support Year
5
Fiscal Year
2010
Total Cost
$144,843
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
041544081
City
Champaign
State
IL
Country
United States
Zip Code
61820
Hourihan, Kathleen L; Fraundorf, Scott H; Benjamin, Aaron S (2017) The influences of valence and arousal on judgments of learning and on recall. Mem Cognit 45:121-136
Fraundorf, Scott H; Benjamin, Aaron S (2016) Conflict and metacognitive control: the mismatch-monitoring hypothesis of how others' knowledge states affect recall. Memory 24:1108-22
Tullis, Jonathan G; Benjamin, Aaron S (2015) Cueing others' memories. Mem Cognit 43:634-46
Fraundorf, Scott H; Watson, Duane G; Benjamin, Aaron S (2015) Reduction in Prosodic Prominence Predicts Speakers' Recall: Implications for Theories of Prosody. Lang Cogn Neurosci 30:606-619
Divis, Kristin M; Benjamin, Aaron S (2014) Retrieval speeds context fluctuation: why semantic generation enhances later learning but hinders prior learning. Mem Cognit 42:1049-62
Tullis, Jonathan G; Braverman, Michael; Ross, Brian H et al. (2014) Remindings influence the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli. Psychon Bull Rev 21:107-13
Hourihan, Kathleen L; Benjamin, Aaron S (2014) State-based metacognition: how time of day affects the accuracy of metamemory. Memory 22:553-8
Tullis, Jonathan G; Benjamin, Aaron S; Liu, Xiping (2014) Self-pacing study of faces of different races: metacognitive control over study does not eliminate the cross-race recognition effect. Mem Cognit 42:863-75
Finley, Jason R; Benjamin, Aaron S; McCarley, Jason S (2014) Metacognition of multitasking: How well do we predict the costs of divided attention? J Exp Psychol Appl 20:158-165
Tullis, Jonathan G; Benjamin, Aaron S; Ross, Brian H (2014) The reminding effect: presentation of associates enhances memory for related words in a list. J Exp Psychol Gen 143:1526-40

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