Poster (Scientific congresses and symposiums)Impact of the number of alternatives during a forced-choice recognition task on recollection and familiarity in normal aging
Simon, Jessica; Gilsoul, Jessica; Bastin, Christine
2017 • Cognitive neuroscience of memory: Recollection, Familiarity and novelty detection
No document available.
Abstract :
[en] Forced-choice recognition tasks are often used to evaluate recognition memory. However, no study have specifically investigate the impact of the number of alternatives on memory performance. Here, we wanted to determine, on the one hand, if the number of alternatives - two or three - and on the other hand if the degree of similarity between targets and foils have an impact on recognition strategies. Moreover, we investigated how aging interacted with these variables. We recruited 20 young and 20 older participants. During the reconnaissance task, they had to choose, among two or three photographs of faces, the one that was presented previously. Some couples of targets and foils were more similar than others (sharing 60% of common characteristics versus 40%). For each selected item, the participants had to explain what guided their choice via verbal reports. We observed similar performance between the groups for the two-alternative recognition memory task, while young participants had better performance than the older participants in the three-alternative task. Young participants used more often recollection when the similarity between targets and foils was higher, unlike older participants whose rate of recollection was not influenced by target-foil similarity. Both groups used more often familiarity in the two-alternative task, but older participants demonstrated a more liberal bias. Finally, our participants used more often elimination strategies when the similarity is low or when they had to select one item out of three.