Age and Distraction: A Misunderstanding of Memory

Older people typically demonstrate mild forgetting that is generally interpreted as memory loss. When considering models of memory and how information is processed, stored, and later retrieved, it seems possible that the mild forgetting could be generated by poor encoding in the first encounter, which would leave the remembered event without strong priming cues to retrieve it. In terms of brain activity and use, older adults show heightened activity in the frontal cortex (the PASA model) and bilaterally (the HAROLD model) which suggests that they attempt to overprocess events and are likely to add irrelevant items that co-occur with relevant ones. The present study will examine whether this processing flaw can be put to better use, by adding auditory cues to visual event encoding by older adults to see if multisensory integration of events enhances later recall and recognition. Auditory stimuli are used as markers that are either congruent with the start of events or incongruent, and they can be simple artificial beep sounds or music that is either familiar to the listener or unfamiliar. Younger adults are also tested to compare the effects of multisensory integration and congruence and familiarity on later recall and recognition. The analysis, focused on accuracy in recall and recognition, would reveal whether capitalizing on the extra effort via bilateral and frontal cortex that older adults naturally use could help them to code multisensory cues for events, and thus improve memory. In contrast, younger adults who seem not to over-encode events may be distracted by the additional auditory cues that are not needed and may remember slightly worse as a function of distraction. Keywords: encoding, auditory cue, memory, older adult, overprocessing, congruence, contex