MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF AGE-RELATED MEMORY DEFICITS

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The purpose of this research is to create a data set that will be used for a preliminary investigation of formal memory model of the age- related changes observed in the memory performance of healthy elderly adults. The research described in this application in this application has two specific goals. First, this project hopes to expand the utility of formal memory models by testing the models' ability to provide a unified account for the pattern of data observed in the recall and recognition performance of healthy elderly adults. The second goal of this project is to investigate encoding and retrieval accounts of the age-related memory deficits observed in the healthy elderly. The current research design proposes to test young adults (18 to 22 years of age) and elderly adults (60 to 70 years of age) over three experimental sessions on tests of free recall, cued recall, single-item recognition, cued recognition, pair recognition, and associative recognition for multiple lists of words and word pairs. The proposed research will constitute the first dataset to include memory performance of young and elderly adults that would provide a powerful-enough data base to use formal memory models to study age- related changes in memory. This research proposal will use the model of Search for Associative Memory (SAM) to test the following four predictions of the age-related deficits observed in the memory performance of elderly adults. The first prediction tests that the age- related deficits are the result of differences between the number of items that can be maintained in an active buffer by elderly adults relative to young adults. The second prediction tests the hypothesis that the age-related deficits are due to differences in the use of contextual information by young and elderly adults. The third perdition tests the hypothesis that the differences in memory performance are due to the ineffective use of elaborative encoding by elderly adults. The fourth prediction tests the hypothesis that memory impairments are due to deficits in the self-initiation of retrieval processes by elderly adults. In addition to these predictions, the nature of our memory test will also allow for additional predictions to be tested. The broad, long-term goal of this research is to further our understanding of human memory by applying formal memory models to study age-related changes in human memory.