May 9, 2019
Multielement Episodic Encoding in Young and Older Adults
Taylor James, M. Natasha Rajah, and Audrey Duarte
Many studies have investigated how age affects binding of single associations into memory but episodic memories in the real world are composed of multiple elements (objects, scenes, people). It isn't clear how aging impacts one's ability to integrate more realistic episodic events. In this imaging study, she finds that older adults are less able than young adults to integrate episodic elements together into a single, cohesive memory potentially because they bring more personally relevant details to their encoding experience that interfere with their ability to integrate and accurately retrieve the episode.
