Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Age-related memory decline is a multifaceted and heterogeneous process. Previous studies on working memory and episodic memory have demonstrated that older participants' memory for item-context bindings (e.g. the location in which an object appeared) drops dramatically, while memory for individual items is relatively preserved. Here, we extend this research in two ways: first, we study memory for ordered object sequences with spatial context, rather than single objects. Second, we investigate how blocked versus interleaved learning curricula affect independent (or marginal) sequence memory (i.e., which objects appeared, and which spatial locations were seen) versus joint sequence memory (which objects appeared where) for older versus younger adults. Across two behavioral experiments with 108 younger (18-35 years) and 100 older (over 65 years) adults, we found better memory for object sequences than position sequences and worst performance for joint object-position sequence reports in both age-groups. Notably, age differences in memory performance followed the same pattern, being least pronounced for sequential object memory and most for joint object-position sequences. Changing the learning curriculum such that either object or spatial location sequences repeated across times, rather than occurring in an interleaved fashion, improved memory performance in both age groups, but had a stronger effect on older than younger adults, suggesting that blocked learning curricula can help older adults with reallocation of limited cognitive resources.