Relative contribution of associative memory and working memory to subjective organisation in aging

Organising information is an efficient way to improve episodic memory performance. When theinformation is not semantically related to each other, individuals can self-organize thisinformation. This spontaneous subjective organisation involves important working memory(WM) resources and is negatively affected by aging, potentially because it also relies onassociative memory. Here, we examined whether such subjective organisation involvesassociative processes, whether this relation is explained by WM capacity, and whether thisrelationship differs with age. We tested 40 young (non-students) adults and 40 older adultson two memory tasks: one allowing for subjective organisation to be implemented andanother accounting for associative memory processes. These participants also performedthree different WM tasks to compute a WM capacity index. Whilst reporting classical age-related effects on recall, recognition and WM performance, we found that both associativememory and WM are related to subjective organisation in both young and older adults.However, between these two factors, WM capacity was the main factor explaining subjectiveperformance in both age groups, though to a greater extent in young adults. These resultsconfirm the central role of WM in episodic memory, particularly in explaining the age-relateddecline of this function.