Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Publication Date
Spring 5-1-2024
Journal
Honours Undergraduate Theses
Abstract
Despite memory declines associated with aging, healthy older adults typically demonstrate a positivity effect, showing better memory for positive than negative information. However, there have been mixed results when testing this effect in populations of older adults experiencing various levels of cognitive decline. These mixed results could exist due to differences in stimulus modalities that have been used to test for this effect, namely words and images. It appears that when using words, those with cognitive decline are less likely to demonstrate the positivity effect than when using images. Images are more perceptually fluent which could compensate for memory loss. I hypothesized that those with cognitive impairment would demonstrate the strongest positivity effect when being tested with images. To test the role of perceptual fluency in eliciting the positivity effect, memory for concrete words, abstract words, and images was examined in a group of older adults experiencing healthy aging or subjective cognitive decline (SCD). A total of 59 participants were recruited from MTurk, 19 who met criteria for SCD using the SCD Questionnaire (Rami et al., 2014). Participants completed three memory tasks that were identical apart from stimuli modality (concrete words, abstract words, and images). Each task involved the presentation of eight positive, eight negative, and eight neutral stimuli, followed by a recognition task. Contrary to what was predicted, results indicated no positivity effect in either group. Images produced the greatest amount of accurately recognized stimuli for both groups, supporting the role that perceptual fluency plays in memory performance. A difference in memory performance was found between concrete and abstract words only for the non-SCD group, suggesting a perceptual fluency threshold among those with SCD.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Notes
Thesis Advisor(s): Dr. Melissa Meade (Second Reader: Dr. Stephen Van Hedger)