Schedule of Events | Symposia

Age-related Changes to Recollection and Familiarity in Supporting Auditory Working Memory

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Chris Hawkins¹ (hawkins@ucdavis.edu), Sharon Li¹, Edward Jenkins¹, Andrew Yonelinas¹; ¹University of California, Davis

Prior work has suggested that visual working memory as measured in change detection tasks can be based on recollection, whereby participants consciously identify a specific feature of a stimulus that has changed, or on assessments of familiarity, whereby participants sense that a change has occurred but are unable to consciously identify what has changed. Recent work revealed that the two processes also support auditory working memory (aWM) performance in younger adults, and that they are functionally dissociable in a manner analogous to visual working memory. Whether recollection and familiarity support auditory working memory in older adults, and whether they dissociate in aging, remains unclear. The present change detection study sought to address that gap in knowledge by having older adults make confidence judgments about whether pairs of speech sounds and pure tones presented through headphones were the same or different. Overall performance between younger and older adults was comparable for speech sounds, but an examination of parameter estimates revealed that older adults showed reduced familiarity for all conditions compared with younger adults. However, for pure tones, overall performance for older adults was significantly lower than younger adults. Critically, this performance difference was driven entirely by a selective reduction in estimates of familiarity in older adults compared with younger. The results indicate that recollection and familiarity contribute to aWM for speech sounds and pure tones in older adults, and that the processes may be differentially impacted in aging.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory