Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Memory and attention do not work in isolation, but reciprocally affect one another. However, most cognitive aging research, and indeed most cognitive research, tends to focus on either process individually with little regard for the interaction between them. The overarching aim of the proposed research is to strengthen our understanding of this relationship by determining (1) how memory and attention interact in the brain and (2) how age-related declines in attention affect memory.

A common view is that memory processes themselves (e.g., the ability to form new associations) decline with age. My work has challenged this position, suggesting that memory processes are relatively preserved with age, what declines is attention. Decreased attention leads older adults to form too many associations and retrieve too much information in response to cues, and all these excess memories get in the way of what they want to remember. The proposed research will use behavioural and neuroimaging techniques to demonstrate that this excess remembering is due to age differences in the ability to control attention and block out distraction. Specifically, the short-term objectives of the proposed work are (1) to examine the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying older adults’ tendency to form too many associations and determine how this broad associative encoding contributes to memory deficits in everyday life, and (2) to determine how age differences in attention interact with the way we commonly test memory to affect retrieval and the neural processes underlying it.

For this purpose, we will test cognitively healthy older (65+) and younger adults using a variety of methods (including eye-tracking, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and electroencephalography). We will test whether young adults also form excess associations when attention is low, identify the neural processes underlying older adults’ excess associations, and determine whether this effect extends to naturalistic stimuli more similar to everyday life (such as movies). Age differences in attention also affect retrieval, and this may be particularly the case when intentionally trying to remember. We will compare neural activity and memory performance during intentional versus unintentional retrieval to determine whether commonly observed age differences are at least partly due to the way we test memory in the lab.

The proposed research stands to redefine the commonly held assumption that age differences in memory arise from some change in memory processes themselves. This work will not only inform theories of neurocognitive aging, but also our understanding of how attention and memory (two fundamental psychological processes) interact more generally. Moreover, through the use of multiple converging methods, this research will provide exceptional training opportunities that will strengthen the skill base of the Canadian workforce.