Dr. Audrey Duarte's lab published a research article in Journal of Cognitive Neurosceince entitled "Neural Reinstatement of Overlapping Memories in Young and Older Adults". This research investigatted why older adults have more difficulty resolving competition between relevant and irrelevant memories. Duarte's lab used used Encoding-Retrieval Similarity (ERS) analysis – which measures the similarity of neural patterns during encoding and retrieval – to better understand how young and older adults process memories. They found that older adults’ susceptibility to old memories competing with new ones is more likely to be due to low fidelity memories of both old and new memories, rather than a failure of inhibition. This suggest that, compared to younger adults, older adults experience memory intrusions from old memories more frequently, but not because they have strong prior memories but because both old and new memories are ‘fuzzy.
October 3, 2022
