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Some young adults hyper-bind too: Attentional control relates to individual differences in hyper-binding

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Abstract

Hyper-binding – the erroneous encoding of target and distractor information into associative pairs in memory – has been described as a unique age effect caused by declines in attentional control. Previous work has found that, on average, young adults do not hyper-bind. However, if hyper-binding is caused by reduced attentional control, then young adults with poor attention regulation should also show evidence of hyper-binding. We tested this question with an individual differences approach, using a battery of attentional control tasks and relating this to individual differences in hyper-binding. Participants (N = 121) completed an implicit associative memory test measuring memory for both target-distractor (i.e., hyper-binding) and target-target pairs, followed by a series of tasks measuring attentional control. Our results show that on average, young adults do not hyper-bind, but as predicted, those with poor attentional control show a larger hyper-binding effect than those with good attentional control. Exploratory analyses also suggest that individual differences in attentional control relate to susceptibility to interference at retrieval. These results support the hypothesis that hyper-binding in older adults is due to age-related declines in attentional control, and demonstrate that hyper-binding may be an issue for any individual with poor attentional control, regardless of age.

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Notes

  1. Missing sex data for two participants. Missing age data for three participants, but indicated to researcher that they were under 30 years.

  2. Using pictures and words from opposing living and non-living categories served as a pilot for a different experiment and does not serve any purpose in the current study.

  3. A sensitivity analysis indicated that this analysis had 80% power to detect a small to medium effect (ηp2 = .065) in the Block type × Pair type interaction.

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Open practices statement

The datasets generated during the current study are available via the Open Science Framework (OSF) at: https://osf.io/678nh/?view_only=354cb066ec8442fb84a32e0c22e15e37. Scripts used to analyze data are available at the same repository. The implicit associative memory task programmed in our lab is available from the corresponding author upon request. This experiment was not pre-registered.

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Grant PJT 180591 to Karen L. Campbell), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Grant RGPIN-2017-03804 to Karen L. Campbell and a CGS-D to Emily E. Davis), and the Canada Research Chairs program.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Brock University, 1812 Sir Isaac Brock Way, St. Catharines, Ontario, L2S 3A1, Canada

    Emily E. Davis, Edyta K. Tehrani & Karen L. Campbell

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  1. Emily E. Davis
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  2. Edyta K. Tehrani
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Correspondence to Emily E. Davis.

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Davis, E.E., Tehrani, E.K. & Campbell, K.L. Some young adults hyper-bind too: Attentional control relates to individual differences in hyper-binding. Psychon Bull Rev (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02464-w

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