Breaking down unitization: Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?
| Autor: | Maria C. D’Angelo, Arber Kacollja, Jennifer D. Ryan, Morgan D. Barense, Alix Noly-Gandon |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
Aging
Statistical relational learning Amnesia Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Context (language use) 050105 experimental psychology Motion (physics) Developmental psychology Task (project management) Cognitive strategy 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) medicine Humans Learning 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Aged Memory Disorders 05 social sciences Middle Aged Comprehension Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Action (philosophy) medicine.symptom Psychology 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Cognitive psychology |
| Zdroj: | Memorycognition. 45(8) |
| ISSN: | 1532-5946 |
| Popis: | Memory impairments are often observed in aging. Specifically, older adults have difficulty binding together disparate elements (relational memory). We have recently shown that a cognitive strategy known as unitization can mitigate impaired relational learning in the transverse patterning task (TP) in both amnesia and healthy aging. This strategy allows items to be fused together through an interaction such that one item acts upon another. In the context of TP, unitization is comprised of three component processes: (1) fusion, (2) motion, and (3) semantic comprehension of action/consequence sequences. Here, we examine which of these components are sufficient to mitigate age-related impairments. Four groups of older adults were given either the full unitization strategy or one of the three component strategies. Each group of older adults showed impairments in memory for the relations among items under standard training instructions relative to a threshold that marks learning of a winner-take-all rule (elemental threshold). However, participants who were given either the full unitization strategy or the action/consequence-only strategy showed improved performance, which was maintained following the 1-hour delay. Therefore, semantically rich action/consequence interactions are sufficient to mitigate age-related relational memory impairments. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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