Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons^™

Effects Of Age On Contextually Mediated Associations In Paired Associate Learning, Jennifer Patricia Provyn

Psychology - Theses

Older adults demonstrate an associative memory deficit that has been attributed to difficulty binding item information to contextual information (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). Accounts of temporally-defined episodic associations that depend upon contextual retrieval (TCM Howard & Kahana, 2002) predict that a deficit in item-to-context binding will result in fewer backward (b-a) and transitive (a-c) associations. To measure group differences in backward and transitive associations, younger and older participants learned single function lists of paired associates with no contextual overlap (e.g., j-k, l-m) and double-function lists of paired associates consisting of chains of pairs (e.g., a-b, b-c). Although younger adults out-performed older adults …