The Effect Of Value On The Associative Memory Of Younger And Older Adults

In our daily life and learning process,we will face a large amount of information.Due to limited cognitive resources,we cannot remember all the information.But it is especially important for our survival and development to remember the important information.For example,before preparing for an exam,we need to remember the necessary points;Before going out,we need to remember that we must carry things.The necessary test points and the things that must be carried are important information.The ability to selectively encode and retrieve these information is needed to ensure that our lives are functioning properly.This involves value-directed memory,which refers to the prioritization and processing of important information to remember.Although aging is associated with a deterioration of memory,older adults are sometimes able to strategically encode and retrieve valuable information.Previous studies have shown that the older adults can selectively remember high-value items,but few have examined the effect of value on associative memory of older adults.The so-called associative memory refers to the memory of the relationship between items and items,items and background information,etc.Since we live in an integrated environment,it is necessary to remember the connections of information.In this regard,this study explores the impact of value on the memory of individuals of different ages.In addition,the research on the effects of value on memory often through experimenter assigned items with different value points to define the value of each items,but in the daily life and learning process,often require assess the value of information by ourselves,Therefore,it is necessary to explore the value-directed memory of individuals of different ages when the value of information requires subjective assessment.This study included two experiments,both of which used 2(age: young people,old people)× 2(value: high value,low value)mixed experimental design to explore the influence of value on the associative memory of younger adults and older adults.In experiment 1,subjects assigned picture-word pairings with different scores to investigate the effect of objective assigned value on theassociative memory of younger and older adults.In experiment 2,the participants were asked to judge whether the pictures could alleviate their lack of physiological needs,so as to investigate the effect of subjective assessed value on the associative memory of younger and and older adults.The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)Although the performance of items recognition of younger adults is significantly higher than that of older adults,there is no significant difference between younger adults and older adults in the performance of objective assigned of high-value items and subjective assessed of high-value items.(2)The value of objectively assignment can reduce the degree of associative memory deficit of older adults.Although the memory of high-value picture-word pairs was still impaired in older adults,the degree of impairment was lower than that of low-value picture-word pairs.(3)The value of subjective assessment had no effect on the recognition of the association between younger adults and older adults.