TY - JOUR
T1 - Healthy aging and visual working memory
T2 - the effect of mixing feature and conjunction changes
AU - Rhodes, Stephen
AU - Parra, Mario A.
AU - Cowan, Nelson
AU - Logie, Robert H.
N1 - ©American Psychological Association, 2017. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission. The final article is available, upon publication, at: https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000152
PY - 2017/3/23
Y1 - 2017/3/23
N2 - It has been suggested that an age-related decrease in the ability to bind and retain conjunctions of features may account for some of the pronounced decline of visual working memory across the adult life-span. So far the evidence for this proposal has been mixed with some suggesting a specific deficit in binding to location, while the retention of surface feature conjunctions (e.g. color-shape) appears to remain largely intact. The present experiments follow up on the results of an earlier study, which found that older adults were specifically poor at detecting conjunction changes when they were mixed with trials containing changes to individual features, relative to when these trials were blocked (Cowan et al., 2006, Dev. Psychol., 42, pp. 1089). Using stimuli defined by conjunctions of color and shape (Experiment 1), and color and location (Experiment 2) we find no evidence that older adults are less accurate at detecting binding changes when trial types are mixed. Further, analysis of estimates of discriminability provides substantial-to-strong evidence against this suggestion. We discuss these findings in relation to previous studies addressing the same question and suggest that much of the evidence for specific age-related VWM binding deficits is not as strong as it first appears.
AB - It has been suggested that an age-related decrease in the ability to bind and retain conjunctions of features may account for some of the pronounced decline of visual working memory across the adult life-span. So far the evidence for this proposal has been mixed with some suggesting a specific deficit in binding to location, while the retention of surface feature conjunctions (e.g. color-shape) appears to remain largely intact. The present experiments follow up on the results of an earlier study, which found that older adults were specifically poor at detecting conjunction changes when they were mixed with trials containing changes to individual features, relative to when these trials were blocked (Cowan et al., 2006, Dev. Psychol., 42, pp. 1089). Using stimuli defined by conjunctions of color and shape (Experiment 1), and color and location (Experiment 2) we find no evidence that older adults are less accurate at detecting binding changes when trial types are mixed. Further, analysis of estimates of discriminability provides substantial-to-strong evidence against this suggestion. We discuss these findings in relation to previous studies addressing the same question and suggest that much of the evidence for specific age-related VWM binding deficits is not as strong as it first appears.
KW - visual working memory
KW - change detection
KW - cognitive aging
KW - feature binding
UR - https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/healthy-aging-and-visual-working-memory(f5e63663-2a39-4eb6-b358-090de3336a18).html
U2 - 10.1037/pag0000152
DO - 10.1037/pag0000152
M3 - Article
VL - 32
SP - 354
EP - 366
JO - Psychology and Aging
JF - Psychology and Aging
SN - 0882-7974
IS - 4
ER -