Schedule of Events | Symposia

Effects of aging on semantic and episodic contributions to false memory

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Isabelle Moore¹ (ilm5fp@virginia.edu), Nicole Long¹; ¹University of Virginia

Healthy older adults experience more false memories than young adults. Traditional false memory paradigms leverage semantic overlap, shared meaning, to induce false memories, but experiences can also overlap temporally meaning that they occur close together in time. Prior work shows that older adults have impaired episodic memory, memory for events within a spatiotemporal context, corresponding to an overall shift toward semantic memory and away from episodic memory across the lifespan. We hypothesize that compared to young adults, older adults rely more heavily on semantic versus temporal information, which promotes false memory. We collected behavioral and electroencephalographic data in young and older adults performing an old/new recognition memory task in which we manipulated the degree of semantic and temporal overlap between study words and included critical lures, unstudied words that semantically overlap with studied words. For both age groups, false memory rates increased for strongly compared to weakly semantically overlapping critical lures, with no effect of temporal overlap strength. However, hit rates differed such that older adults showed a significant dissociation between weakly temporally overlapping targets on the basis of semantic overlap, but young adults did not. These findings suggest that young and older adults differentially leverage semantic information. When events overlap both temporally and semantically, young and older adults rely more heavily on semantic versus temporal information, leading to increased false memory susceptibility. When events overlap semantically, but not temporally, older adults rely more heavily on semantic information than young adults to recognize targets.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic