scholarly journals The interaction of curiosity and reward on long-term memory in younger and older adults

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liyana T. Swirsky ◽  
Audrey Shulman ◽  
Julia Spaniol

AbstractThe study was conducted to examine the individual and joint effects of extrinsic motivation, manipulated via monetary reward, and curiosity, a form of intrinsic motivation, on long-term memory in the context of a trivia paradigm, in healthy younger and older adults. During the incidental encoding phase on Day 1, 60 younger and 53 older participants viewed high- and low-curiosity trivia as well as unrelated face stimuli. Half of the participants in each age group received financial rewards for correctly guessing trivia answers. On Day 2, participants completed old-new recognition tests for trivia and face stimuli. Both curiosity and reward were associated with enhanced trivia recall, but the effects were interactive, such that only low-curiosity items benefitted from monetary reward. Neither curiosity nor reward affected face recognition performance in either age group. This pattern was similar for younger and older adults. The current data indicate that individual and joint effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on long-term memory are relatively preserved in healthy aging, a finding that highlights the viability of motivational strategies for memory enhancement into old age. Identifying conditions under which memory for unrelated information benefits from motivational spillover effects is a priority for future research.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea M. Bartsch ◽  
Vanessa M. Loaiza ◽  
Lutz Jäncke ◽  
Klaus Oberauer ◽  
Jarrod A. Lewis-Peacock

AbstractMaintenance of information in working memory (WM) is assumed to rely on refreshing and elaboration, but clear mechanistic descriptions of these cognitive processes are lacking, and it is unclear whether they are simply two labels for the same process. This fMRI study investigated the extent to which refreshing, elaboration, and repeating of items in WM are distinct neural processes with dissociable behavioral outcomes in WM and long-term memory (LTM). Multivariate pattern analyses of fMRI data revealed differentiable neural signatures for these processes, which we also replicated in an independent sample of older adults. In some cases, the degree of neural separation within an individual predicted their memory performance. Elaboration improved LTM, but not WM, and this benefit increased as its neural signature became more distinct from repetition. Refreshing had no impact on LTM, but did improve WM, although the neural discrimination of this process was not predictive of the degree of improvement. These results demonstrate that refreshing and elaboration are separate processes that differently contribute to memory performance.HighlightsRepeated reading, refreshing, and elaboration are differentiable in brain activation patterns in both young and older adults.Elaboration selectively improved long-term memory for young adults, and the size of the benefit was related to the neural separability of elaboration from other processes.Older adults implemented a sub-optimal form of elaboration, and this may be a factor contributing to age-related deficits in long-term memory.Ethics statementThe study was approved by the ethical review board of the canton of Zurich (BASEC-No. 2017-00190) and all subjects gave informed written consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.Data and code availability statementAll behavioral data and analysis scripts can be assessed on the Open Science Framework (osf.io/p2h8b/). The fMRI data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, LMB. The fMRI data are not publicly available due to restrictions of the Swiss Ethics Committees on research involving humans regarding data containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.


2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (8) ◽  
pp. 1317-1325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Strunk ◽  
Lauren Morgan ◽  
Sarah Reaves ◽  
Paul Verhaeghen ◽  
Audrey Duarte

Abstract Objectives Declines in both short- and long-term memory are typical of healthy aging. Recent findings suggest that retrodictive attentional cues (“retro-cues”) that indicate the location of to-be-probed items in short-term memory (STM) have a lasting impact on long-term memory (LTM) performance in young adults. Whether older adults can also use retro-cues to facilitate both STM and LTM is unknown. Method Young and older adults performed a visual STM task in which spatially informative retro-cues or noninformative neutral-cues were presented during STM maintenance of real-world objects. We tested participants’ memory at both STM and LTM delays for objects that were previously cued with retrodictive or neutral-cues during STM order to measure the lasting impact of retrospective attention on LTM. Results Older adults showed reduced STM and LTM capacity compared to young adults. However, they showed similar magnitude retro-cue memory benefits as young adults at both STM and LTM delays. Discussion To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate whether retro-cues in STM facilitate the encoding of objects into LTM such that they are more likely to be subsequently retrieved by older adults. Our results support the idea that retrospective attention can be an effective means by which older adults can improve their STM and LTM performance, even in the context of reduced memory capacity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 584-603
Author(s):  
Liyana T. Swirsky ◽  
Audrey Shulman ◽  
Julia Spaniol

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Strunk ◽  
Lauren Morgan ◽  
Sarah Reaves ◽  
Paul Verhaeghen ◽  
Audrey Duarte

Declines in both short and long-term memory are typical of healthy aging. Recent findings suggest that retrospective attentional cues ("retro-cues") that indicate the location of to-be-probed items enhance both short (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) performance in young adults. Whether older adults can also use retro-cues to facilitate both STM and LTM memory is unknown.Young and older adults performed a visual STM task in which spatially informative retro-cues or non-informative neutral-cues were presented during STM maintenance of real-world objects. We tested participants' memory for retro-cued and neutral-cued objects at both at short and long delays in order to measure the effect of retrospective attention on STM and LTM. Older adults showed reduced STM and LTM capacity compared to young adults. However, they showed similar magnitude retro-cue memory benefits as young adults at both STM and LTM delays. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate whether retro-cues improve both STM and LTM in older adults. Our results support the idea that retrospective attention can be an effective means by which older adults can improve their short and long-term memory performance, even in the context of reduced memory capacity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-77
Author(s):  
Cyntia Diógenes Ferreira ◽  
Maria José Nunes Gadelha ◽  
Égina Karoline Gonçalves da Fonsêca ◽  
Joenilton Saturnino Cazé da Silva ◽  
Nelson Torro ◽  
...  

SLEEP ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. A47-A47
Author(s):  
N Sattari ◽  
L Whitehurst ◽  
K Vinces ◽  
S Mednick

Abstract Introduction It is widely accepted that “offline” processes during sleep contributes to memory. Working Memory (WM) capacity, which reflects “online” memory processing, is an important factor influencing cognitive functioning, which declines with age. In younger individuals, a positive association is reported between WM-capacity and declarative memory improvement. Methods We examined the relation between WM and long-term memory consolidation, among younger [N=105, 18-25yr] and older adults (N=119, 60-85yr). Subjects completed an OSPAN WM task, encoded a Word-Paired Association (WPA) task in the morning (Test1), and were tested on the WPA in the afternoon (Test2) after a 90-minute polysomnographically-recorded nap or wake. Half of the subjects were exposed to negatively valenced word-pairs (EWPA) while the other half were exposed to neutral word-pairs (NWPA). Subjects rated valence of the word-pairs at Test1 and Test2. We compared the four groups (young-EWPA, young-NWPA, old-EWPA and old-NWPA) on WM and WPA in both wake and sleep. Results In both wake and sleep, in the WPA, ageXword-condition interaction was found (p=.004). Post-hoc analysis revealed that in wake, younger-EWPA had higher performance (p=.03) than younger-NWPA, however, older-EWPA had lower performance (p=.03) than older-NWPA. Additionally, we found an ageXword-condition interaction whereby youngers showed no change in ratings, while older adults rated word-pairs more positively both in wake (p=.03) and sleep (p=.002) at Test 2. Youngers had higher WM performance (p=.007), also their WM performance was positively associated with WPA both for Neutral (p=.03) and Emotional (p=.01). WM and WPA among older adults was not related. In younger-EWPA, Stage2-sleep-minutes was positively associated to WPA improvement (p=.03) where this association was negative among older-EWPA (p=.02). In older-NWPA, Stage2-sleep-minutes was positively associated with WPA (p=.004). Conclusion Our findings indicate an association between WM and emotionally-salient memory formation that is modulated by age. Older adults, but not younger, showed the emotional bias previously reported. WM was higher in younger adults related to memory improvement. Stage2-sleep was related to memory improvement in both groups, but in opposite directions. In sum, the role of sleep in memory consolidation changes with aging and WM may play a role in this process. Support Fenn et al.,2012


2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (8) ◽  
pp. 1298-1307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick S R Davidson ◽  
Petar Vidjen ◽  
Sara Trincao-Batra ◽  
Charles A Collin

Abstract Objectives Pattern separation in memory encoding entails creating and storing distinct, detailed representations to facilitate storage and retrieval. The Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST; Stark, S. M., Yassa, M. A., Lacy, J. W., & Stark, C. E. [2013]. A task to assess behavioral pattern separation [BPS] in humans: Data from healthy aging and mild cognitive impairment. Neuropsychologia, 51, 2442–2449) has been used to argue that normal aging leads to pattern separation decline. We sought to replicate previous reports of age-related difficulty on this behavioral pattern separation estimate and to examine its neuropsychological correlates, specifically long-term memory function, executive function, and visual perception. Methods We administered an object version of the MST to 31 young adults and 38 older adults. It involved a single-probe recognition memory test in which some of the originally studied objects had been replaced with perceptually similar lures, and participants had to identify each as old, a lure, or new. Results Despite their corrected item recognition scores being superior to those of the young adults, the older adults had significantly greater difficulty than the young in discriminating the similar-looking lures from the original items. Interestingly, this lure discrimination difficulty was significantly correlated with visual perception rather than with long-term memory or executive function. Discussion These results suggest that although adult age differences on the MST are reliable, care should be taken to separate perceptual from memory discrimination difficulties as the reason.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Truong

To resolve discrepancies between studies on the effects of emotional content on working memory, and to examine changes with age, this study examined the effects of emotional content on working memory and subsequent long-term memory for targets and distracters. Thirty-six younger (ages 18-29) and 36 older adults (ages 65-87) participated in a working memory task in which they viewed two target words intermixed with two distracters followed by a probe word, and responded to whether the probe was a target word. The emotional content (valence and arousal) of targets and distracters was manipulated. Subsequent long-term memory was tested with a free recall task. Results indicated that emotional content of targets facilitated working adults experiencing disruption from positive and neutral distracters, and older adults experiencing interference from negative distracters. Emotional effects in long-term memory were only seen for younger adults.


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