Amy A. Overman, assistant professor of psychology, is first author of an article accepted for publication in Psychology and Aging, the foremost journal of aging in the field of psychology. Her co-author is James Becker (University of Pittsburgh).
Psychology and Aging is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association and has a 72% rejection rate. The journal “publishes original articles on adult development and aging. Such original articles include reports of research that may be applied, biobehavioral, clinical, educational, experimental (laboratory, field, or naturalistic studies), methodological, or psychosocial.”
Overman’s article, “The associative deficit in older adult memory: Recognition of pairs is not improved by repetition,” used a novel experimental paradigm to investigate the difficulty that older adults have in forming links between pieces of information. Overman found that when older adults viewed word-face pairs more than once, they subsequently recognized the individual words and faces more accurately but were not any more accurate in remembering whole pairs.
This contrasted with younger adults, whose recognition of both items and pairs increased with repeated exposure. The study provides converging evidence that age-related memory decline in older adults is the result of an associative deficit.