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Normal aging impairs long-term declarative memory, and evidence suggests that this impairment may be driven partly by structural or functional changes in the medial temporal lobe (MTL). Theories of MTL memory function therefore make predictions for age-related memory loss. One theory – the Representational-Hierarchical account – makes two specific predictions. First, recognition memory performance in older participants should be impaired by feature-level interference, in which studied items contain many shared, and thus repeatedly appearing, perceptual features. Second, if the interference in a recognition memory task – i.e., the information that repeats across items – resides at a higher level of complexity than simple perceptual features, such as semantic gist, older adults should be less impacted by such interference than young adults. We tested these predictions using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, by creating feature-level (i.e., perceptual) interference with phonemically/orthographically related word categories, and higher-level associative interference with semantically related word categories. We manipulated category size in order to compare the effect of less versus more interference (i.e., small versus large category size), which served to (1) avoid potential item confounds arising from systematic differences between words belonging to perceptually- versus semantically-related categories, and (2) ensure that any effect of interference was due to information encoded at study, rather than pre-experimentally. Further, we used signal detection theory (SDT) to interpret our data, rather than examining false alarm (FA) rates in isolation. The d’ measure derived from SDT avoids contamination of the memory measure by response bias, and theoretically lies on an interval scale, allowing memory performance in different conditions to be compared without violating assumptions of the statistical tests. Older participants were relatively more impaired by perceptual interference and less impaired by semantic interference than young adults. This pattern is at odds with many current theories of age-related memory loss, but is in line with the Representational-Hierarchical account.
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A Computational Model of Perceptual and Mnemonic Deficits in Medial Temporal Lobe Amnesia
Damage to the medial temporal lobe (MTL) has long been known to impair declarative memory, and recent evidence suggests that it also impairs visual perception. A theory termed the representational-hierarchical account explains such impairments by assuming that MTL stores conjunctive representations of items and events, and that individuals with MTL damage must rely upon representations of simple visual features in posterior visual cortex, which are inadequate to support memory and perception under certain circumstances. One recent study of visual discrimination behavior revealed a surprising antiperceptual learning effect in MTL-damaged individuals: With exposure to a set of visual stimuli, discrimination performance worsened rather than improved [Barense, M. D., Groen, I. I. A., Lee, A. C. H., Yeung, L. K., Brady, S. M., Gregori, M., et al. Intact memory for irrelevant information impairs perception in amnesia. Neuron, 75, 157–167, 2012]. We extend the representational-hierarchical account to explain this paradox by assuming that difficult visual discriminations are performed by comparing the relative “representational tunedness”—or familiarity—of the to-be-discriminated items. Exposure to a set of highly similar stimuli entails repeated presentation of simple visual features, eventually rendering all feature representations maximally and, thus, equally familiar; hence, they are inutile for solving the task. Discrimination performance in patients with MTL lesions is therefore impaired by stimulus exposure. Because the unique conjunctions represented in MTL do not occur repeatedly, healthy individuals are shielded from this perceptual interference. We simulate this mechanism with a neural network previously used to explain recognition memory, thereby providing a model that accounts for both mnemonic and perceptual deficits caused by MTL damage with a unified architecture and mechanism.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1554871
- PAR ID:
- 10660469
- Publisher / Repository:
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Volume:
- 29
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0898-929X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1075 to 1088
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01106
