Attention-memory interactions in children and young adults

Abstract

Associative memory (the ability to bind parts of an event into an integrated unit) is important for encoding episodic events. Critically, associative memory changes throughout the lifespan, such that memory shows protracted development into young adulthood, then declines in older adults. In this thesis, I propose that this developmental trajectory is a result of age-related changes to attentional control, which affects associative memory performance in children and older adults. To test this, I took two approaches: 1) I tested children 8-12 years old on two associative memory tasks that differed in the demands placed on attention, and related performance on these tasks to individual differences in attentional control, and 2) I tested young adults in an experiment that measured memory for target-target and target-distractor associations and explored whether individual differences in attentional control predicted the extent that participants encoded these two types of associative pairs. The erroneous encoding of target-distractor pairs (referred to as hyper-binding) has been previously described as an effect unique to older adulthood, and so here we tested whether even young adults with poor attentional control showed these effects and to establish whether deficits in attentional control drove this effect. Our results support the hypothesis that attentional control influences associative memory performance and may be a cause of the developmental changes that we see in associative memory throughout the lifespan.