UCLA

Visuospatial memory is an important cognitive process that allows us to remember the identity and location of objects in the environment. As the binding of visual and spatial features is required, visuospatial memory represents an attentionally-demanding form of associative memory (Chalfonte & Johnson, 1996). Further, substantial evidence has shown that older adults may have specific deficits in the remembering associations (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). Despite this associative deficit, older adults and younger adults under conditions of divided attention have been shown to exhibit maintained memory selectivity – that is, despite remembering less information overall, they are still able to attend to and later remember high-value information. The current Dissertation investigates the underlying attention (Chapter 2), memory (Chapter 3), and metacognitive (Chapter 4) processes involved in this prioritization ability and how they change with age.

Chapter 2 examines how the ability to selectively remember high-value information in the visuospatial domain is affected in dual-task paradigms in which attention must be divided between multiple tasks. Evidence is provided of maintained prioritization when concurrent tasks draw from different processing resources, but impaired prioritization when they draw form overlapping processing resources, as evidenced by a lack of selectivity in intra-modal dual-task conditions. Chapter 3 explores how older adults’ prioritization ability compares to younger adults in this demanding visuospatial associative memory context and how younger adults’ strategies may change when negatively valued information is present. Results suggest that older adults maintain selectivity relative to younger adults, but still display deficits in memory for high-value information. Younger adults were also biased towards studying and remembering positive over negative locations, despite equivalent influence on their task goals. Finally, Chapter 4 studied the metacognitive processes underlying prioritization ability in younger and older adults, revealing a tradeoff in resources from prioritizing high-value information to accurately monitoring memory performance. The current Dissertation adds to our knowledge about people’s ability to selectively remember important information, a crucial form of cognitive control, by casting further light upon the attentional, memorial, and metacognitive aspects involved in the prioritization of visuospatial information.