The Influence Of Unitization On Item Components In Association Memory Tasks For The Elder

Objective:The ability of episodic memory showed a selective decline with age,as shown by the significant age-related associative deficit of older adults who relied on the recollection process,while item memory ability,which relied on familiarity,remained intact.Unitization is the process of encoding two separate item into a characterization.The study found that unitization can encourage older people to use better retention of familiarity to reduce age-related associative memory injury,but whether unitization will reduce the elderly also rely on familiarity of the item components of memory extraction is not clear.This paper discusses this problem through two experiments.Experiment I used event-related potential(ERP),technology,to explore whether bottom-up unitization could affect the item components and related neural mechanisms of older people in associative memory tasks.Experiment Ⅱ uses event-related potential technology to explore whether top-down unitization affects the item components and related neural mechanisms of the elderly in the associative memory task.Results:The behavioral results of experiment Ⅰ showed that bottom-up unitization increased the ability of the elderly to re-recognize the results in associative memory tasks,but also increased the ability to distinguish the components of the item,and found that the elderly in the unitization and non-unitization of the two coding conditions have the same level of prefrontal old/new effect.On the contrary,in the old/new effects of the top leaf,the elderly only exist in the unitization conditions of the old/new effects of the top leaves,this result showed that bottom-up unitization can make use of preexisting relationships,in coding,compared with non-unitization conditions easier to establish junction characterization,save a certain amount of cognitive resources for the establishment of complete item characterization,rather than unitization conditions,the elderly in the establishment of junction characterization at the same time difficult to retain additional cognitive resources into the item component coding,can only build vague item characterization.Therefore,the elderly in the bottom-up unitization coding can rely more on recollection to achieve higher item test results than non-integrated coding,the behavior of experiment Ⅱ showed that top-down integration increases the elderly re-recognition results in associative memory tasks,while reducing the ability to identify the components of the item,in the ERP indicators found that the elderly only in non-unitization conditions exist the old/new effects of the forehead,in the top leaf old/new effects,unitization and non-unitization of the two coding conditions have the same level of old/new effects effects.This result showed that top-down unitization hinders the overall coding of item components while performing junction coding.Because only incomplete information item characterization containing a certain characteristic is established,so that the elderly lack the "familiarity" of the item components,it is difficult to rely on familiarity to achieve the extraction of item components,and familiarity is an important process to support the elderly to achieve memory extraction,therefore,the elderly in the top-down unitization coding more difficult to rely on familiarity for memory extraction,resulting in lower item test results than non-unitization coding.Conclusion:Compared with non-unitization coding,the use of unitization coding can reduce age-related associative deficit,compared with non-unitization conditions,the elderly after the unitization of coding can improve the re-recognition results in the associative memory task,but for the item components in the associative memory task,different types of unitization coding will have different effects.Under the bottom-up unitization coding,the elderly can rely on both familiarity and recollection for item extraction,thereby improving the performance of the item test,while the top-down unitization coding will make it difficult for the elderly to rely on familiarity for item extraction,resulting in a decrease in item test scores.