scholarly journals Retrospective attention facilitates short and long-term memory across age

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Strunk ◽  
Lauren Morgan ◽  
Sarah Reaves ◽  
Paul Verhaeghen ◽  
Audrey Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Healthy Aging ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Short And Long Term

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.

scholarly journals Retrospective Attention in Short-Term Memory Has a Lasting Effect on Long-Term Memory Across Age

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (8) ◽  
pp. 1317-1325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Strunk ◽  
Lauren Morgan ◽  
Sarah Reaves ◽  
Paul Verhaeghen ◽  
Audrey Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Healthy Aging ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Short And Long Term

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.

Short- and long-term memory tasks predict working memory performance, and vice versa.

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Neath ◽  
Jean Saint-Aubin ◽  
Tamra J. Bireta ◽  
Andrew J. Gabel ◽  
Chelsea G. Hudson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Short And Long Term

scholarly journals Expert radiologists have improved memory performance for images with focal abnormalities

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayden Schill ◽  
Jeremy Wolfe ◽  
Timothy F. Brady
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Attentional Processing ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Focal Abnormality

Memory capacity depends on prior knowledge, both in working memory and in long-term memory. For example, radiologists have improved long-term memory for medical images compared to novices. Furthermore, people tend to remember abnormal or surprising items best. This is often claimed to arise primarily because such items attract additional attention at encoding. How do expertise and abnormality interact when experts are actively searching for abnormalities; e.g. radiologists looking at mammograms? In the current work, we investigate whether expert radiologists (N=32) show improved memory performance for abnormal images compared to novice participants (N=60). We consider two types of “abnormality.” A mammogram can have a focal abnormality that can be localized or it could simply be the mammogram of a woman known to have cancer (e.g. the image of the breast contralateral to the focal abnormality). Must an image have a focal abnormality for additional attentional processing to be engaged? We found that experts have better memory for mammograms than novice participants and enhanced memory for abnormal images relative to normal images. Overall, radiologists showed no memory benefit for the contralateral-abnormal images and did not discriminate them from normal images, but had enhanced memory for images with focal abnormalities. Our results suggest that focal abnormalities play an important role in enhancing memory of expert observers.

scholarly journals Dissociating refreshing and elaboration and their impacts on memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea M. Bartsch ◽  
Vanessa M. Loaiza ◽  
Lutz Jäncke ◽  
Klaus Oberauer ◽  
Jarrod A. Lewis-Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Ethics Committees ◽  
Fmri Data ◽  
Ethical Review ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
List Type ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Age Related

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.

scholarly journals Older Adults’ Lure Discrimination Difficulties on the Mnemonic Similarity Task Are Significantly Correlated With Their Visual Perception

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (8) ◽  
pp. 1298-1307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick S R Davidson ◽  
Petar Vidjen ◽  
Sara Trincao-Batra ◽  
Charles A Collin
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Executive Function ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Behavioral Pattern ◽  
Pattern Separation ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Age Related

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.

scholarly journals Short- and long-term memory and age in a traditional tribe (Dani of Papua) and a modern population (Poland)

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-142
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Sabiniewicz ◽  
Maciej Karwowski ◽  
Corinna E. Löckenhoff ◽  
Barbara Borkowska ◽  
Piotr Sorokowski
Keyword(s):  
Reading Ability ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Age Difference ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Technical Developments ◽  
Short And Long Term ◽  
Two Populations

Abstract The different environmental conditions in which people live might challenge memory in different ways. Moreover, the frequency of usage can be a source of improvement of both short- and long-term memory. The aim of our study was to investigate the effects of environmental differences on short- and long-term memory in a traditional versus a contemporary population (Dani of Papua, n = 62; Polish, n = 134). We found that both short- and long-term memory varied in the two populations, living in totally distinct surroundings. However, there were no age differences between Polish and Dani participants in either short- or long-term memory tasks, indicating that culture was not a significant moderator of the memory differences between populations. The differences in short- and long-term memory between the two populations are consistent with the argument that short-term memory plays a more significant role in contemporary societies because of technical developments, the electronic revolution, and reading ability. The lack of an age difference appears to support the assumption that it is age, not culture, that plays a crucial role in the memory performance.

scholarly journals Adult age differences in refreshing and elaboration and their consequences for working memory and long-term memory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea Maria Bartsch ◽  
Klaus Oberauer
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Working Memory ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Adult Age ◽  
Adult Age Differences

Older adults show a pronounced decline in long-term memory (LTM), but the source of this deficit is still debated. The present study investigated whether deficient engagement in refreshing and elaboration at the level of working memory (WM) causes this deficit. Our results show that the benefit of refreshing in WM was unaffected by age. Refreshing had no effect on LTM in both young and older adults. Elaboration benefited LTM in young adults, but not in older adults. Therefore, the LTM deficit of older adults might arise at least in part from a deficit in the process of elaboration.

scholarly journals Neutral ceramidase is a marker for cognitive performance in rats and monkeys

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liubov S. Kalinichenko ◽  
An-Li Wang ◽  
Christiane Mühle ◽  
Laila Abdel-Hafiz ◽  
Erich Gulbins ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Plasticity ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Object Memory ◽  
Predictive Role ◽  
Short And Long Term

Abstract Background Ceramides are lipid molecules determining cell integrity and intercellular signaling, and thus, involved in the pathogenesis of several psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. However, little is known about the role of particular enzymes of the ceramide metabolism in the mechanisms of normal behavioral plasticity. Here, we studied the contribution of neutral ceramidase (NC), one of the main enzymes mediating ceramide degradation, in the mechanisms of learning and memory in rats and non-human primates. Methods Naïve Wistar rats and black tufted-ear marmosets (Callithrix penicillata) were tested in several tests for short- and long-term memory and then divided into groups with various memory performance. The activities of NC and acid ceramidase (AC) were measured in these animals. Additionally, anxiety and depression-like behavior and brain levels of monoamines were assessed in the rats. Results We observed a predictive role of NC activity in the blood serum for superior performance of long-term object memory tasks in both species. A brain area analysis suggested that high NC activity in the ventral mesencephalon (VM) predicts better short-term memory performance in rats. High NC activity in the VM was also associated with worse long-term object memory, which might be mediated by an enhanced depression-like state and a monoaminergic imbalance. Conclusions Altogether, these data suggest a role for NC in short- and long-term memory of various mammalian species. Serum activity of NC may possess a predictive role in the assessing the performance of certain types of memory.

scholarly journals Investigation of the relationship between visual feature binding in short- and long-term memory in healthy aging

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 109-113
Author(s):  
Annamária Manga ◽  
Petra Madurka ◽  
Pál Vakli ◽  
C. Brock Kirwan ◽  
Zoltán Vidnyánszky
Keyword(s):  
Healthy Aging ◽  
Feature Binding ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Visual Feature ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Short And Long Term ◽  
The Relationship
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