The long-term goals of the project are to facilitate understanding of the effects of cognitive aging on memory processes, and to provide a basis for the development of techniques and interventions that can aid memory functions of the elderly in everyday life.
The specific aims of the proposed research are to elucidate the basis for previously observed age- related impairments in both explicit memory (conscious recollection of past events) and implicit memory (nonconscious influences of past events on subsequent performance). The main hypothesis is that a variety of deficits exhibited by elderly adults on explicit and implicit memory tests are attributable to an age-related impairment in binding together different kinds of information into an integrated memory trace of an episode. One consequence of this deficit is that the recollective experience of elderly adults is often impoverished: they fail to recollect the perceptual contexts of past events, and they are relatively less likely than the young to consciously """"""""remember"""""""" the past occurrence of an event, and instead tend to say that they just """"""""know"""""""" that the event occurred. The proposed research on explicit memory will investigate these issues in a novel domain that has potentially important theoretical and practical implications, but has not yet been studied experimentally: the effects of exposure of photographs of events from recently experienced episodes on subsequent memory performance and recollective experience. Photographs are highly valued by elderly adults for their memory cueing functions, but there is no published research that has examined how looking at photos of past events influences elderly adults' subsequent recollections. It is hypothesized that exposure to photos will assist the elderly in binding together elements of episodes, and will therefore enhance their recollective experience. The proposed studies will examine the nature of, and basis for, photo exposure effects with a newly developed experimental paradigm in which old and young subjects view videotapes of simple events and later look at photos of some of the events. Effects of photo exposure are then assessed on tests of recall, recognition, and recollective experience. The research on implicit memory will also examine issues pertaining to elderly adults' ability to bind together different kinds of information. Tests that require identification or completion of spoken word fragments will be used to examine implicit memory for recently heard words and voices. Proposed experiments will test the hypothesis that previously documented age- related deficits in implicit memory for voice information are observed when priming depends on, or is enhanced by, binding together word and voice information.
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