Schedule of Events | Symposia

Examining the influence of proximal spatial configurations on the neural correlates of item-item associative memory in older adults

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

Alexa Becker¹ (agb5621@psu.edu), Catherine M. Carpenter¹, Spencer O. Chase, John T. West¹, Amy A. Overman², Nancy A. Dennis¹; ¹The Pennsylvania State University, ²Xavier University

Associative memory has been shown to decline in aging while memory for single items remains relatively intact. Unitization is a process that has been demonstrated to enhance associative memory by uniting discrete items into a single ensemble. Unitization has been argued to support associative memory in older adults by taking advantage of their intact item memory. However, unitized items and single items have never been directly compared in a neuroimaging paradigm. The current study aimed to compare the neural activation patterns of unrelated image pairs encoded in a unitized manner to both image pairs encoded in a non-unitized manner and single images. Behaviorally, a presentation intended to promote unitization—where image pairs were proximally spaced and oriented logically—enhanced associative memory performance in older adults relative to image pairs that were distally spaced (not thought to promote unitization). Neurally, pattern similarity analyses (PSA) at encoding showed greater similarity in neural patterns between the proximal and distal pairings compared to the single images and proximal pairings throughout the MTL and cortex. At retrieval, this same result is observed in the cortex; however, the proximal and distal pairings are no more similar than the single images and proximal pairings within the MTL. Additionally, univariate contrasts of proximal and distal image pairs in the MTL show a difference in the magnitude and location of activation from encoding to retrieval. Results suggest that although proximity enhances associative memory in older adults, it does not shift processing completely over to that of single items.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging