Item Prelearning in Memory for Face-Name Associations Among Young and Older Adults

There is substantial evidence of age-related decline in the ability to bind and memorize meaningful associations into a cohesive unit, a phenomenon named the associative deficit. In particular, proper name associations for faces are more susceptible to memory failure. The current study investigated the effect of item and pair prelearning procedures on face-name associative memory in young and older adults. Item prelearning involved learning individual items of a pair sequentially (i.e., a face, and a name), before learning the association (i.e., a face-name pair), whereas pair prelearning entailed exposure to associative information before encoding. The leading hypothesis proposed that pair prelearning would replicate the well-demonstrated associative memory deficit. In contrast, item prelearning was hypothesized to allocate attentional resources for effective binding. The cross-experiment results revealed minor advantageous effects in item prelearning conditions for older adults, compared to pair prelearning. The study builds upon previous research and has meaningful implications in advancing cognitive aging theories, informing memory interventions, and developing optimal learning strategies. Keywords: Aging, recognition, encoding, face-name, item prelearning, proper names