Associative memory with value-directed learning in younger and older adults

According to the associative deficit hypothesis, older adults experience greater difficulty remembering associations between pieces of information (i.e., associative memory) than younger adults, despite their relatively intact memory for individual items (i.e., item memory). Recent studies showed that value-directed learning might have the potential to enhance older adults' associative memory and reduce their associative deficit, but the results are mixed with previous designs relying largely on recall. To fill the gap, this study aims to assess younger and older adults' associative memory with a classical associative memory recognition task in a value-directed remembering paradigm. In this task, participants studied high- and low-value word pairs and were then tested with item and associative recognition tasks. The two age groups performed the same in both item and associative memory, and high-value items/pairs were better remembered than low-value items/pairs for both age groups. These results raised a possibility that older adults' associative deficit and overall memory could be alleviated with value-directed processing at encoding and retrieval. The results shed light on the mechanisms underlying aging-related memory declines and inform memory intervention practice for older adults.