Discuss changes in associative memory in the late adulthood phase of life.

Answers will vary. We use associative learning, and associative memory, to remember that the written letter A has the sound of an A. We also use associative memory to develop a sight vocabulary; that is, we associate the written word "the" with the sound of the word; we do not decode it as we read. In these cases we usually learn by rote rehearsal, or repetition. But we also often use elaborative rehearsal, which is a more complex strategy that makes learning meaningful, to retrieve the associated spellings for spoken words. It turns out that aging has a more detrimental effect on associative memory than on memory for single items. For example, older adults have greater difficulty discriminating between new and already experienced combinations of items on an associative recognition task-that is, recognizing pairs of words that have been presented before-than between new and already experienced single items on an item recognition task. Various possibilities have been hypothesized to explain the age-related deficit in associative memory. One is an impairment in the initial binding or learning phase of individual pieces of information when the individual is attempting to encode them. According to the binding hypothesis, older adults are impaired primarily in associating items with one another, but not in remembering individual items. A second hypothesis states that the specific impairment is in recollection when the individual attempts to retrieve the information, which may reflect poor binding during encoding, poor use of strategic processes during retrieval, or both. Research by Melanie Cohn and her colleagues suggests that impairments in associative memory among older adults represent problems in binding information, recollection, and use of effective strategies for retrieval (such as creating sentences that use both members of a pair of words as they are presented). For example, if one member of a pair is "man" and another is "cigarette," an elaborative strategy for recollecting the pair could be to rapidly construct the sentence, "The man refuses to smoke a cigarette." Cohn and her colleagues believe that these cognitive developments "are consistent with neurobiological models" of memory that focus on the frontal and medial temporal lobes of the brain. The frontal regions-the executive center of the brain-are involved in directing one's attention and organizing information and strategic processes. The medial temporal lobe binds elements to form memory traces, recovers information in response to use of proper memory cues, and is therefore a key to recollection. Neurological research shows that deterioration is evident in aging in the frontal lobes and to a lesser degree in the medial temporal lobe, thus logically impairing binding, recollection, and the use of effective strategies for the retrieval of information.