Unitization Based Memory Enhancement in Younger and Older Adults
Memory for episodic associations declines with ageing due to decreased recollection abilities. Unitization—the encoding of multiple items as one integrated entity—has been shown to support familiarity-based retrieval that is independent of recollection and is relatively preserved in healthy ageing....
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Ubiquity Press
2025-07-01
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| Series: | Journal of Cognition |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://account.journalofcognition.org/index.php/up-j-jc/article/view/457 |
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| Summary: | Memory for episodic associations declines with ageing due to decreased recollection abilities. Unitization—the encoding of multiple items as one integrated entity—has been shown to support familiarity-based retrieval that is independent of recollection and is relatively preserved in healthy ageing. Accordingly, unitization has been proposed as a promising strategy to attenuate age-related associative deficits, but evidence regarding its utility was lacking. The current study aimed to establish unitization as a viable mnemonic strategy. First, to ensure that unitization can attenuate the age-related associative deficit for initially unrelated materials, top-down unitization was used. Namely, participants were given an initially unrelated word pair in the context of either a definition which allows the words to be encoded as a unitized compound or a sentence in which the words are encoded as separate entities. Second, to ensure that unitization can be used as a self-initiated strategy, participants also completed the task by generating their own binding information (definitions/sentences). As expected, a unitization effect had emerged, such that associative memory was enhanced following definition encoding. However, this effect only occurred when binding information was provided. Additionally, a general memory advantage for the self-generation condition had emerged, but this was (generally) similar across unitization conditions and age groups. Taken together, the results show that unitization can be used as a mnemonic strategy under certain conditions, and highlight additional steps that should be taken before it can be effectively used beyond lab settings. |
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| ISSN: | 2514-4820 |