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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Name: Brittany Corbett
Master’s Thesis Defense Meeting
Date: Tuesday, November 19th, 2019
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: CABI Conference Room
Advisor:
Audrey Duarte, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Thesis Committee Members:
Mark Wheeler, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Eric Schumacher, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Title: Age-related Changes in Resolving Proactive Interference in Associative Memory
Abstract: Previous research has found that older adults are more susceptible to proactive interference. This is likely due to age-related deficits in the PFC-mediated cognitive control processes recruited to resolve interference. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated if age-related deficits in PFC-mediated cognitive control processes underlie age-related differences in the resolution of proactive interference in an associative memory task. Young and older adults were tasked with remembering which associate (face or scene) objects were paired with most recently during study, under conditions of high, low or no proactive interference. Following scanning, participants’ memory was tested for varying levels of episodic detail about the pairings (i.e. target category vs. specific target category vs. specific target associate). Young and older adults were similarly susceptible to proactive interference. Memory for both the general target category and the specific target associate worsened as the level of proactive interference increased, with older adults having moderately worse memory for the specific target associate. Across age, the left-VLPFC showed increased recruitment for increasing levels of interference at encoding suggesting that older adults are able to spontaneously engage in post-retrieval selection to the same extent as young adults. At retrieval, older adults recruited the vmPFC more than young adults during remembered low interference trials but similarly recruited the vmPFC during remembered high interference trials. In line with the CRUNCH model, this suggests that older adults are reaching their task capacity sooner than young adults and need to engage in more monitoring of the successful retrieval of low interference target-object pairing. Whereas, during levels of high interference, young and older adults are engaging in a similar amount of monitoring, suggesting that successfully resolving high interference is equally difficult for both young and older adults.
