| Popis: |
Memory declines over the course of healthy aging. However, memory is not a monolith, and draws from different kinds of representations. Historically, much of our understanding of age-related memory decline arise from recognition of items that tend to focus on isolated studied items. In contrast, real-life events are remembered as narratives, and this kind of information is often missed in typical memory recognition studies. Here, we designed a task to tax mnemonic discrimination of event details, directly contrasting perceptual and narrative memory. Older and younger adults watched an episode of a television show and later completed an Old/New recognition test featuring targets, novel foils, and similar lures in narrative and perceptual domains. While we observed no age-related differences on basic recognition of repeated targets and novel foils, older adults showed a deficit in correctly rejecting perceptual, but not narrative lures. Further analyses split the older adult group into low versus high scorers on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), revealing that age-related deficits in discrimination performance of perceptual lures were largely driven by older adults with low MoCA scores. These findings provide insights into the vulnerability of different memory domains in aging, and may be useful in characterizing individuals at risk for pathological cognitive decline. |
