Biomedical subjects

Mara Mather

Publications and source records attributed to Mara Mather.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

A functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of short-term source and item memory for negative pictures.

We investigated the hypothesis that arousal recruits attention to item information, thereby disrupting working memory processes that help bind items to context. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we compared brain activity when participants remembered negative or neutral picture-location conjunctions (source memory) versus pictures only. Behaviorally, negative trials showed disruption of short-term source, but not picture, memory; long-term picture recognition memory was better for negative than for neutral pictures. Activity in areas involved in working memory and feature integration (precentral gyrus and its intersect with superior temporal gyrus) was attenuated on negative compared with neutral source trials relative to picture-only trials. Visual processing areas (middle occipital and lingual gyri) showed greater activity for negative than for neutral trials, especially on picture-only trials.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

Memory for choices in Alzheimer's disease.

Despite their cognitive impairment, patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) often make important life choices. When making choices, people frequently attempt to directly compare the features of different options, rather than evaluating each option separately. Not every feature has an analogous (or alignable) feature in the other option, however. In 2005, Mather's group found that both younger and older adults filled in such gaps when remembering, creating features in the other option to contrast with existing features. In the present study, such effects of alignability on recognition memory were not found in patients with mild AD. This finding suggests that patients with mild AD are less likely to engage in feature-by-feature comparison processes across choice options, a change that may lead them to make qualitatively different choices than healthy older adults.

Aged↗

PubMed2006

Angry faces get noticed quickly: threat detection is not impaired among older adults.

Previous studies have found that younger adults detect threatening stimuli more quickly than other types of stimuli. This study examined whether older adults also show this adaptive threat-detection advantage. On each trial in the experiment, participants saw an array consisting of nine schematic faces. Eight of the faces were neutral; the ninth was neutral, angry, happy, or sad. Participants indicated whether there was a discrepant face in each array. Both older and younger adults were significantly faster to correctly detect a discrepant face when it signaled threat than when it signaled happiness or sadness. There was no age difference in this threat-detection advantage, indicating that this automatic process is maintained among older adults.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

Emotional arousal can impair feature binding in working memory.

To investigate whether emotional arousal affects memorial feature binding, we had participants complete a short-term source-monitoring task-remembering the locations of four different pictures over a brief delay. On each trial, the four pictures were all either high arousal, medium arousal, or low arousal. Memory for picture-location conjunctions decreased as arousal increased. In addition, source memory for the location of negative pictures was worse among participants with higher depression scores. Two subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments showed that relative to low-arousal trials, high- and medium-arousal trials resulted in greater activity in areas associated with visual processing (fusiform gyrus, middle temporal gyrus/middle occipital gyrus, lingual gyrus) and less activity in superior precentral gyrus and the precentral-superior temporal intersect. These findings suggest that arousal (and perhaps negative valence for depressed people) recruits attention to items thereby disrupting working memory processes that help bind features together.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory.

As people get older, they experience fewer negative emotions. Strategic processes in older adults' emotional attention and memory might play a role in this variation with age. Older adults show more emotionally gratifying memory distortion for past choices and autobiographical information than younger adults do. In addition, when shown stimuli that vary in affective valence, positive items account for a larger proportion of older adults' subsequent memories than those of younger adults. This positivity effect in older adults' memories seems to be due to their greater focus on emotion regulation and to be implemented by cognitive control mechanisms that enhance positive and diminish negative information. These findings suggest that both cognitive abilities and motivation contribute to older adults' improved emotion regulation.

Aging↗

PubMed2005

The allure of the alignable: younger and older adults' false memories of choice features.

When making choices, people often try to directly compare the features of different options rather than evaluating each option separately. Not every feature has an analogous (or alignable) feature in the other option, however. In this study, both younger and older adults filled in such gaps when remembering, creating features in the other option to contrast with existing features. Thus, participants had a tendency to remember choice options as more comparable than they originally were. High performance on tasks tapping strategic processing was associated with a pattern of mostly feature-based comparisons during choice for older adults but with a pattern of mostly option-based comparisons for younger adults. This pattern suggests that younger and older adults' comparison processes are influenced by different goals.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Goal-directed memory: the role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory.

The present study revealed that older adults recruit cognitive control processes to strengthen positive and diminish negative information in memory. In Experiment 1, older adults engaged in more elaborative processing when retrieving positive memories than they did when retrieving negative memories. In Experiment 2, older adults who did well on tasks involving cognitive control were more likely than those doing poorly to favor positive pictures in memory. In Experiment 3, older adults who were distracted during memory encoding no longer favored positive over negative pictures in their later recall, revealing that older adults use cognitive resources to implement emotional goals during encoding. In contrast, younger adults showed no signs of using cognitive control to make their memories more positive, indicating that, for them, emotion regulation goals are not chronically activated.

Affect↗

PubMed2004

Amygdala responses to emotionally valenced stimuli in older and younger adults.

As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

The role of motivation in the age-related positivity effect in autobiographical memory.

This study reveals that older adults have a positivity effect in long-term autobiographical memory and that a positivity bias can be induced in younger adults by a heightened motivation to regulate current emotional well-being. Three hundred nuns, ages 47 to 102 years, recalled personal information originally reported 14 years earlier. They did so under experimental conditions that repeatedly primed them to focus on their current emotional states or on their memory accuracy, or that provided no instructional focus (control condition). Both older control participants and participants who were focused on emotional states showed a tendency to remember the past more positively than they originally reported in 1987. In contrast, both younger control participants and participants who were focused on accuracy tended to remember the past more negatively than originally reported.

Age Factors↗

PubMed2003

Aging and emotional memory: the forgettable nature of negative images for older adults.

Two studies examined age differences in recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. In Study 1, younger, middle-aged, and older adults were shown images on a computer screen and, after a distraction task, were asked first to recall as many as they could and then to identify previously shown images from a set of old and new ones. The relative number of negative images compared with positive and neutral images recalled decreased with each successively older age group. Recognition memory showed a similar decrease with age in the relative memory advantage for negative pictures. In Study 2, the largest age differences in recall and recognition accuracy were also for the negative images. Findings are consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits greater investment in emotion regulation with age.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Aging and attentional biases for emotional faces.

We examined age differences in attention to and memory for faces expressing sadness, anger, and happiness. Participants saw a pair of faces, one emotional and one neutral, and then a dot probe that appeared in the location of one of the faces. In two experiments, older adults responded faster to the dot if it was presented on the same side as a neutral face than if it was presented on the same side as a negative face. Younger adults did not exhibit this attentional bias. Interactions of age and valence were also found for memory for the faces, with older adults remembering positive better than negative faces. These findings reveal that in their initial attention, older adults avoid negative information. This attentional bias is consistent with older adults' generally better emotional well-being and their tendency to remember negative less well than positive information.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2003

Remembering chosen and assigned options.

Recent studies have shown systematic choice-supportive memory for past choices, wherein people tend to overattribute positive features to options they chose and negative features to unchosen options (Mather & Johnson, 2000, Mather, Shafir, & Johnson, 2000). In contrast, the present experiments showed no choice-supportive memory bias for assigned options. Rather than having a general motivation to recall the chosen or the assigned option in a more positive light, people appear to be influenced by heuristics that vary with context: In recalling past choices, people expect the chosen option to contain more positive and fewer negative features than do its competitors. In recalling past assignments, in contrast, people expect the assigned option to be remembered better than the unassigned alternatives. This vividness heuristic leads to systematic misattribution of new features to unassigned alternatives, but not in a manner supportive of the assigned option. Some implications of these findings are discussed.

Choice Behavior↗

PubMed2003

Affective review and schema reliance in memory in older and younger adults.

Previous studies have found that, when remembering, older adults often rely more on schematic knowledge than do younger adults. We replicated this finding when participants were induced to review the facts of the event; furthermore, neuropsychological correlates suggested that this age-related increase in schema reliance is associated with declines in reflective processes. In addition, when they were induced to focus on their feelings and reactions when reviewing an event, both older and younger adults' later memory of the event was strongly affected by their schematic knowledge.

Adolescent↗