Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Pattern separation in proper name retrieval in midlife
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Vanja Kljajevic1, Myles Tollefsen2; 1University of Oslo, 2Trinity College Dublin
Introduction Brain aging negatively affects the ability to retrieve proper names. Recent evidence suggests that such changes are present already in midlife1-3, but the cognitive mechanisms of this decline are still not well understood. The present study investigated whether the ability to separate overlapping representations (pattern separation) is related to decline in name retrieval in midlife. Three experiments were designed to determine whether the ability to retrieve names learned incidentally in (i) single-name presentation, (ii) name-place-object triads, and (iii) famous people names-place-object triads is affected in midlife, and if so, how it relates to pattern separation. Twenty-nine young adults (YA) (M = 24.7, SD = 2.75) and 21 middle-aged individuals (MA) (M = 48.5, SD = 6.12) participated in the study. The groups differed in age (t (48) = 18.586, p < .0001), but not in years of education, cognitive status (assessed by MoCA), short-term memory (digit span forward), working memory (digit span backward) or executive functions (Raven Progressive Color Matrices) (all ps < .05). The groups did not differ in retrieval accuracy of proper names learned in single-name presentation, but YA were faster than MA (t (48) = 2.201, p = .027) (Experiment 1). YA and MA did not differ in correctly identifying either semantic or phonological lures as well as new names in this task. However, relative to YA, MA had worse retrieval accuracy scores on name-place-object triads (t (48) = 2.126, p = .039) and similar response times (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the YA group was more accurate than the MA group in identifying both phonological (t (48) = 3.191, p = .002) and semantic lures (t (48) = 2.814, p = .007) on this task, indicating better pattern separation related to word representations. Finally, the groups did not differ in the accuracy of word retrieval on triads containing famous persons’ names-place-object, but YA were faster (t (48) = 3.685, p = .001) (Experiment 3). Within the MA group, higher scores were found for recognition of new items than semantic lures (t (20) = 19.478, p < .0001) and phonemic lures (t (20) = 13.025, p < .0001) respectively. YA were better than MA on retrieving synonyms (t (48) = 2.047, p = .046), but not rhymes. The synonyms’ scores correlated with the retrieval accuracy on the single name presentation task (r = .455, p = .001) and on name-place-object triads (r = .334, p = .018), including the triads with famous persons’ names (r = .463, p = .001). Thus, the present data suggest that the ability to separate overlapping representations is associated with MA persons’ retrieval of names, i.e. either retrieval accuracy or speed of processing, when encoding involves name-place-object triads.
Topic Areas: Language Production,