Do healthy elders, like young adults, remember animates better than inanimates? An adaptive view

Aurélia Bugaiska 1, * Alain Méot 2 Patrick Bonin 1
* Auteur correspondant
1 LEAD - Laboratoire d'Etude de l'Apprentissage et du Développement [Dijon]
2 LAPSCO - Laboratoire de psychologie sociale et de psychologie cognitive
Abstract : Background/Study Context: It has been found that young adults remember animates better than inanimates. According to the adaptive view of human memory, this is due to the fact that animates are more important for fitness purposes than inanimates. This effect has been ascribed to episodic memory, where older people exhibit difficulties. Methods: Here the authors investigated whether the animacy effect in memory also occurs for healthy older adults. Older and young adults categorized words for their animacy characteristics and were then given an unexpected recognition test on the words using the Remember/Know paradigm. Executive functions were also evaluated using several measures. Results: For both overall Recognition and Remember responses, a reliable animacy effect on hit rates was found in young but not in older adults. Controlling for certain executive functions led to reliable and comparable animacy effects in both groups. There was no reliable effect of animacy on Know responses. Conclusion: Thus, unlike young adults, older adults do not remember animates better than inanimates; this pattern can be attributable to a decline in executive functions.
Keywords : Animate Memory Access Patterns Recognition Psychology Adults Executive Functions
Type de document :
Article dans une revue
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https://hal-univ-bourgogne.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01424904
Contributeur : Lead - Université de Bourgogne <>
Soumis le : mardi 3 janvier 2017 - 09:42:30
Dernière modification le : vendredi 8 juin 2018 - 14:50:07

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UNIV-BOURGOGNE | CNRS | LAPSCO | PRES_CLERMONT | LEAD_UB

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Aurélia Bugaiska, Alain Méot, Patrick Bonin. Do healthy elders, like young adults, remember animates better than inanimates? An adaptive view. Experimental Aging Research, Taylor & Francis, 2016, 42 (5), pp.447 - 459. ⟨10.1080/0361073X.2016.1224631⟩. ⟨hal-01424904⟩

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