Visual short-term memory through the lifespan: preserved benefits of context and metacognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Visual short-term memory ability falls throughout the lifespan in healthy adults. Using a continuous report task, in a large, population-based sample, we first confirmed that this decline affects the quality and quantity of reported memories as well as knowledge of which item went where. Visual and sensorimotor precision also worsened with advancing age, but this did not account for the reduced memory performance. We then considered two strategies that older individuals might be able to adopt, to offset these memory declines: the use of contextual encoding, and metacognitive monitoring of performance. Context and metacognitive awareness were both associated with significantly better performance, however these effects did not interact with age in our sample. This suggests that older adults retain their capacity to boost memory performance through attention to external context and monitoring of their performance. Strategies that focus on taking advantage of these preserved abilities may therefore help to maintain short-term memory performance with advancing age. The paper reports on analysis of the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".