Executive function and high ambiguity perceptual discrimination contribute to individual differences in mnemonic discrimination in older adults
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mnemonic discrimination deficits, or impaired ability to discriminate between similar events in memory, is a hallmark of cognitive aging, characterised by a stark age-related increase in false recognition. While individual differences in mnemonic discrimination have gained attention due to potential relevance for early detection of Alzheimer's disease, our understanding of the component processes that contribute to variability in task performance across older adults remains limited. The present investigation explores the roles of representational quality, indexed by perceptual discrimination of objects and scenes with overlapping features, and strategic retrieval ability, indexed by standardised tests of executive function, to mnemonic discrimination in a large cohort of older adults (N=124). We took an individual differences approach and characterised the contributions of these factors to performance under Forced Choice (FC) and Yes/No (YN) recognition memory formats, which place different demands on strategic retrieval. Performance in both test formats declined with age. Accounting for age, individual differences in FC memory performance were best explained by perceptual discrimination score, whereas YN memory performance was best explained by executive functions. A linear mixed model and dominance analyses confirmed the relatively greater importance of perceptual discrimination over executive functioning for FC performance, while the opposite was true for YN. These findings highlight parallels between perceptual and mnemonic discrimination in aging, the importance of considering demands on executive functions in the context of mnemonic discrimination, and the relevance of test format for modulating the impact of these factors on performance in older adults.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it