Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Episodic memory is memory for the events from our lives and underlies several critical functions (e.g., problem solving and planning for the future). Episodic memory is known to become less specific and more error-prone with age. Despite the importance of episodic memory to our daily lives, we still have a poor understanding of why these changes occur with age. The long-term objectives of my research program are to 1) determine the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie age differences in episodic memory and 2) train the next generation of scientists dedicated to the study of aging and memory. In my research to date, I have shown that age differences in episodic memory may be largely due to older adults' lessened ability to control attention. For instance, older adults have trouble ignoring distraction and they sometimes link that distraction to information that should be attended (an effect we termed `hyper-binding'). However, this work has mainly used simple stimuli (e.g., pictures and words) that bear little resemblance to the events we experience in everyday life. The proposed research program aims to determine if hyper-binding extends to memory for more complex, life-like events. Memory for everyday events is often studied in the lab by using naturalistic stimuli (such as movies or narratives) that are continuous and rich with meaning - much like our day-to-day lives. Previous work suggests that we divide these continuous experiences up into a series events (e.g., eating breakfast, driving to work) and perceive 'event boundaries' whenever there is a shift in space, time, or goals. These boundaries are thought to trigger an attentionally-demanding process that puts the previous event out of mind in order to focus on the next event. Research in my lab has started to ask how age-related declines in attentional control affect this updating process at event boundaries and the consequences for long-term event memory, but several important questions remain that we plan to address in the proposed research. My short-term objectives for the funding period are to determine whether age-related declines in attentional control lead older adults to: 1) form broader associations over time (i.e., across event boundaries), as we have previously shown with simple word stimuli; 2) integrate more distraction into their event memories (i.e., hyper-bind distracting information within a scene); and 3) experience more interference at retrieval from related knowledge, thus contributing to forgetting. I plan to address these objectives using a multi-method approach, including eye-tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), and novel experimental paradigms, which will allow my trainees to gain valuable experience with several cutting-edge methodologies. By testing the generalizability of hyper-binding, this work will further our understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying age-related differences in memory for complex events in everyday life.