Age-related Decline in Associative Memory: Understanding the Roles of Controlled and Automatic Processes
Memory decline in old age is highly noticeable based on tasks assessing episodic memory, which require remembering information about events at specific times and places. The exact cognitive mechanism that accounts for this prominent age-related decline in episodic memory has not been well-understood, and the multitude of mechanisms that were proposed have drawn a credible amount of research and discussions. The current review focuses on the associative deficit hypothesis (ADH) - originally proposed by Naveh-Benjamin and colleagues - that was suggested to form the basis of age-related declines in episodic memories. According to the ADH, older adults’ poorer episodic memory is attributed to the difficulties they experience in formulating relations or links between single units of information (i.e., items or contextual elements), binding them together into a coherent distinctive unit, and retrieving the links between the component features/units whenever necessary [COPYRIGHT CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 J. Y. ZHONG, 2018].