Wednesday, January 15, 2025
1/15/2025
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The decline of episodic memory is one of the most commonly reported causes of anxiety related to aging, and an ever-growing public health burden—but when older adults’ prior knowledge (i.e., schema) is consistent with what they are trying to remember, older adults typically exhibit no memory deficits relative to younger adults. When their schema is conflicting with to-be-remembered information, however, older adults exhibit marked memory deficits relative to younger adults. The mechanisms driving these schema effects on older adults’ memory are still unclear, and there is lively debate regarding those mechanisms: One prevailing theory of age-related memory deficits proposes that schema effects are driven by degraded episodic memory fidelity in older adults, while the other proposes that these effects are instead driven by older adults failing to inhibit inappropriate schema influence. Critically, no extant theory of memory decline can account for the full pattern of schema effects on older adults’ memory; thus, the drivers of schema effects on age-related memory deficits are unknown. Until we understand how schema-memory interactions shape older adults’ memory, we cannot fully understand age-related memory decline. This project aims to elucidate the processes through which schemas influence older adults’ memory deficits in two specific aims: (1) Test the predictions of a novel theory of age differences in schema-memory interactions, and (2) Determine the cognitive mechanisms underlying schema effects on age-related memory deficits. A converging operations approach will be taken, using computational cognitive modeling, eyetracking, and new behavioral paradigms with parametric memory assessments and real-world scenes. The fellow’s primary training goal is to learn to use computational cognitive modeling, which will permit direct examination of nuanced interactions between relevant cognitive processes—such as the role of inhibitory control in driving age differences in schema-memory interactions. The sponsors have complementary expertise in computational cognitive modeling, schema-memory interactions, memory aging, and inhibitory control. The applicant will benefit from the rich research and training environment within the sponsors’ research groups as well as at the university at large, which offers resources that are uniquely relevant to the project such as a speaker series on advanced memory analysis; a workshop series for learning advanced programming skills; a high-performance computing center that offers hardware, training, and consultation; and graduate seminars in computational cognitive modeling. The proposed research stands to substantially advance our understanding of memory deficits in healthy aging by directly testing previously theorized mechanisms for the first time, identifying new mechanisms that had not previously been considered, and putting forward a new theory that stands to reconcile competing theories. These findings are thus expected to provide a strong foundation for the development of interventions for memory decline in aging, such as interventions targeting the use of schemas in memory decisions.
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