Schedule of Events | Symposia

Reactivation of initial associations predicts reduced proactive interference in memory for updated associations in younger and older adults

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

Joseph Stephens¹ (stephensj12@xavier.edu), Ashley Bruner¹, Nancy Dennis², Amy Overman¹; ¹Xavier University, ²Pennsylvania State University

The age-related associative deficit in memory (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000) is partly characterized by older adults’ greater susceptibility to proactive interference when existing associations are updated with new information (Wahlheim, 2014). The current study tested the hypothesis that reactivating a previous association during the encoding of an updated association helps to protect against interference at later retrieval of the updated association. Young adults (N = 35) and older adults (N = 34) participated in an fMRI experiment that tested memory for initial and updated associations of low-imageability words paired with pictures of faces, scenes, and objects. Five scanner runs were conducted, in which each of 12 words was encoded with an initial picture associate, followed by cued recall of the initial picture and encoding of a new picture associate from a different category, and cued recall of the new picture. In a post-scanning recognition task, participants selected which of three pictures was the “new” picture for each word that had been studied. Multivariate analyses were used to quantify reactivation of neural representations for the initial pictures during cued recall and encoding of updated word-picture associations. For both age groups, post-test accuracy correlated with reactivation of the initial picture representation during the first recall and second encoding phases in the scanner. Additionally, for young adults, reactivation of the initial picture at the second recall phase correlated with post-test false alarms. The findings support the interpretation that age differences in proactive interference are linked to reductions in the reinstatement of prior information.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging