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Abstract
Older adults have difficulties in binding information in long-term memory (e.g. objects
with colours). The effect of age on visual short-term memory (VSTM) binding is less
well understood. Recent evidence has suggested that older adults' VSTM for colours
bound to shapes or for locations bound in configural representations may be preserved.
In two experiments we investigated whether this lack of an age effect on VSTM for
bound features can be reproduced when features are drawn from the same dimension (i.e.
colour-colour binding) and when spatial clues are not available. Younger and older
adults were presented with two sequential arrays of unicoloured or bicoloured objects
and their accuracy in detecting changes between arrays was used as the measure of
memory performance. Memory was assessed using a change detection paradigm for unicoloured
objects and for bicoloured objects with changes in colour conjunctions (i.e. colours
swapping between objects) or with changes in non-conjunctive colours (i.e. colours
replacing colours in the study array). Both young and older adults were less accurate
at remembering objects defined by colour conjunctions than unicoloured objects or
objects composed of two non-conjunctive colours (Experiment 1). Increasing task demands
in terms of memory and perceptual load had no greater effect on the older than the
younger adults (Experiment 2). We suggest (1) that colours were not integrated into
single units in VSTM; (2) that remembering the binding between colours has a cost;
and (3) that neither of these effects are age-dependent.