Yanelis Santiago, “Episodic Memory and Aging: Examining False Memory Recall”
Mentor: Caitlin Bowman, Psychology, Letters & Science (College of)
Poster #121
Episodic memory is a form of long-term memory that allows individuals to recall specific events or memories from their past (Tulving, 1985). It is an important function in cognition as it allows us to use our past experiences to guide our decisions and behavior in everyday life. Past literature shows that aging impacts memory abilities, specifically impacting memory specificity (Chalfonte & Johnson, 1996). The Desse-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) is a false memory paradigm that allows us to test individual’s episodic memory abilities (Roediger & McDermott, 1999). In the DRM, participants are presented with a list of semantically related words and asked to remember as many as possible. Later, we test their memory of the words they were shown. The test includes words they were just shown (old), entirely new words (new), and words that were not presented but share the same theme as the lists presented (critical). The aim of this study was to investigate age differences in episodic memory between older and younger adults. In this present study, we collected 10 young adult participants from UWM’s SONA sign-up system and 10 older adults from the Milwaukee community. Due to evidence in past literature, we expected older adults to have more instances of false memories (i.e., calling critical items ‘old’) than younger adults. Investigating memory differences in aging populations is important because it may lead to more beneficial support and interventions to preserve memory function.