Accurate memory for an object or event requires that multiple diverse features are
bound together and retained as an integrated representation. There is overwhelming
evidence that healthy ageing is accompanied by an associative deficit in that older
adults struggle to remember relations between items above any deficit exhibited in
remembering the items themselves. However, the effect of age on the ability to
bind features within novel objects (for example, their colour and shape) and retain
correct conjunctions over brief intervals is less clear. The relatively small body of
work that exists on this topic to-date has suggested no additional working memory
impairment for conjunctions of features beyond a general age-related impairment in
the ability to temporarily retain features. This is in stark contrast to the feature
binding deficit observed in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Nevertheless,
there have been reports of age-related feature binding deficits in working memory
under specific circumstances. Thus a major focus of the present work was to assess
these potential boundary conditions.
The change detection paradigm was used throughout this work to examine age-differences in visual working memory. Despite the popularity of this task important
issues regarding the way in which working memory is probed have been left unaddressed.
Chapter 2 reports three experiments with younger adults comparing two
methods of testing recognition memory for features or conjunctions. Contrary to an
influential study in the field, it appears that processing multiple items at test does
not differentially impact on participants’ ability to detect binding changes.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 report a series of experiments motivated by previous findings
of specific age-related feature binding deficits. These experiments, improving on previous methodology where possible, demonstrate that increasing the amount of time
for which items can be studied (Chapter 3) or mixing feature-conjunction changes in
trial-blocks with more salient changes to individual features (Chapters 4 and 5) does
not differentially impact on healthy older adults’ ability to detect binding changes.
Rather, the argument is made that specific procedural aspects of previous work led
to the appearance of deficits that do not generalise. Chapter 5 also addresses the
suggestion that healthy ageing specifically affects the retention of item-location conjunctions.
The existing evidence for this claim is reviewed, and found wanting, and
new data are presented providing evidence against it.
To follow-up on the absence of a deficit for simple feature conjunctions, Chapter 6
contrasts two theoretically distinct binding mechanisms: one for features intrinsic
to an object and another for extrinsic, contextual features. Preliminary evidence is
reported that the cost associated with retaining pairings of features is specifically
pronounced for older adults when the features are extrinsic to each other.
In an attempt to separate out the contribution of working memory capacity
and lapses of attention to age-differences in overall task performance, Chapter 7
reports the results of an exploratory analysis using processing models developed
in Chapter 2. Analysis of two data sets from Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrates that
lapses of attention make an important contribution to differences in change detection
performance.
Chapter 8 returns to the issue of measurement in assessing the evidence for
specific age-related deficits. Simulations demonstrate that the choice of outcome
measure can greatly affect conclusions regarding age-group by condition interactions,
suggesting that some previous findings of such interactions in the literature may have
been more apparent than real.
In closing the General Discussion relates the present work to current theory
regarding feature binding in visual working memory and to the wider literature on
binding deficits in healthy and pathological ageing