Schedule of Events | Symposia

Decay makes all the difference: Facilitation and interference from thematic relations in younger and older adults

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Katarina Antolovic¹ (katarina.antolovic@gmail.com), Jessica Marutani², Yan H. Yu³, Mira Goral^1,4, Valerie L. Shafer¹; ¹The Graduate Center, City University of New York, ²Hunter College, City University of New York, ³St. John's University, ⁴Lehman College, City University of New York

Thematic relations are context-dependent word associations (e.g., “shell” is an exemplar of the thematic category “beach”). Competing theories propose that co-activation of thematically related words may aid (e.g., Oppenheim & Nozari, 2021) or interfere with (e.g., Abdel Rahman & Melinger, 2019) lexical retrieval. Previous work suggests older adults are less susceptible to context effects due to age-related decrements in contextual processing. This study compared these theories and assessed age-related differences in retrieval. Twenty-four younger (M = 28.5) and 23 older (M = 70.35) adults completed a modified Blocked Cyclic Naming Paradigm. Participants listened to a narrative establishing a thematic context (e.g., day at the beach) and named related or unrelated images in two block configurations: related items followed by unrelated items (related-first blocks), and vice-versa. We examined responses during initial picture naming and across five repetitions. Participants experienced facilitation from related items in related-first blocks, but interference in unrelated-first blocks. Younger adults experienced greater interference from related items than older adults, but only during initial naming. Electrophysiological N2 amplitudes were more negative for both related items in related-first blocks and unrelated items in unrelated-first blocks. Overall, thematic relations facilitate naming initially but produce interference as conceptual priming decays. The electrophysiological data suggest that the mechanisms underlying retrieval are sensitive to context; both groups exhibited more negative N2 amplitudes for words appearing immediately following the narrative regardless of condition. These results suggest a dynamic relationship between thematic relations, decay in working memory, and aging that current theories do not account for.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging