Campbell, Glenys M. (2012) Age-related Associative Memory Declines in Short-term Recall. Doctorate (other than PhD) thesis, University of Southern Queensland. (Unpublished)
Abstract
Older participants typically do not perform as well on both long-term (LTM) and short-term episodic memory (STM) tasks. It has been suggested that this deficit is due to older people experiencing difficulty in binding pieces of information together. This binding hypothesis was tested in the context of associative relatedness effects. Three experiments were conducted to test the assumption that semantic associative relationships among items within the long-term memory framework influenced short-term memory performance for older and younger adults differently. Specifically this study expected that younger adults would perform better than older adults on Immediate Serial Recall (ISR) tasks and that associatively related words of various levels would be better recalled than unrelated words. The current experiments involve the study of lists for ISR generated by selecting 180 associative pairs from the University of South Florida free association norms. Participants studied lists that contained a number of items that were associatively related to each other and performance was compared to lists where all the items within the list were unrelated to each other. Sixty-five younger adults (18-64 years) and 60 older adults (65 ≥ years) were recruited on a voluntary basis from South-east Queensland communities to participate in the study. While the results of the experiments confirmed expectations that the younger group performed significantly better than the older group on all memory tasks, the pattern of performance was highly similar for both groups. The one differences was that older participants were not affected by the spacing of the associates within the list in Experiment 2, this was not the case in Experiment 3, where older adults’ performance was enhanced for associatively related words placed in the serial order 1-3-5 compared to unrelated word lists. The present study demonstrated that associative information from long-term memory impacts on short-term memory and that older adults experience the same type of difficulties in forming temporary episodic bindings in STM as in long-term episodic memory tasks.
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| Item Type: | Thesis (Non-Research) (Doctorate (other than PhD)) |
|---|---|
| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Additional Information: | Current UniSQ staff and students can request access to this thesis. Please email research.repository@unisq.edu.au with a subject line of SEAR thesis request and provide: Name of the thesis requested and Your name and UniSQ email address |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Historic - Faculty of Sciences - Department of Psychology (Up to 30 Jun 2013) |
| Supervisors: | Gerry Tehan |
| Qualification: | Doctor of Psychology (Clinical) |
| Date Deposited: | 29 Sep 2025 23:36 |
| Last Modified: | 29 Sep 2025 23:36 |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | memory ; short-term recall ; age-related memory decline ; old adults ; young adults |
| Fields of Research (2008): | 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 1799 Other Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 179999 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences not elsewhere classified |
| Fields of Research (2020): | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5299 Other psychology > 529999 Other psychology not elsewhere classified |
| URI: | https://sear.unisq.edu.au/id/eprint/52194 |
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