Frontal and medial temporal contributions to item and associative recognition in aging (2008)

Undergraduates: Elisabeth Cordell, none none none

Faculty Advisor: Kelly Giovanello
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Although memory performance declines with age, not all forms of memory are equally affected. Item memory and relational memory are both sensitive to the effects of aging, yet age effects are nearly twice as large for relational than for item memory. Categorizing forty-seven healthy older adult participants as having good or poor frontal function, and also, as having good or poor medial temporal lobe function relative to the group as a whole, the current study investigated the relationship between participants’ frontal lobe and medial-temporal lobe function and performance on three memory tasks: a test of recognition memory for items, a test of associative recognition memory for pre-existing relations, and a test of associative recognition memory for novel relations. Results show a significant relationship between participants’ medial temporal lobe function and performance on the associative recognition for pre-existing relations task (R2 = .185, p = .0025).