Associative memory declines with age, and this decline is thought to stem from a decreased ability to form new associations or bind information together. However, a growing body of work suggests that (a) the binding process itself remains relatively intact with age when tested implicitly and (b) older adults form excessive associations (or “hyper-bind”) because of a decreased ability to control attention. In this article, we review evidence for the hyper-binding hypothesis. This work shows that older adults form more nontarget associations than younger adults, which leads to increased interference at retrieval and forgetting, an effect that may extend to others with poor attentional control, such as children and people with attention-deficit disorder. We discuss why hyper-binding is apparent only under implicit test conditions and how it affects memory for everyday events. Although hyper-binding likely contributes to forgetting, it may also confer certain advantages when seemingly irrelevant associations later become relevant.

中文翻译：

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超结合：老年人形成的关联太多，而不是太少


联想记忆随着年龄的增长而下降，这种下降被认为源于形成新联想或将信息结合在一起的能力下降。然而，越来越多的研究表明，（a） 在隐含测试时，结合过程本身随着年龄的增长保持相对完整，并且 （b） 老年人由于控制注意力的能力下降而形成过度关联（或“超结合”）。在本文中，我们回顾了高结合假说的证据。这项工作表明，老年人比年轻人形成更多的非目标关联，这导致检索和遗忘的干扰增加，这种影响可能会延伸到注意力控制不佳的其他人，例如儿童和注意力缺陷障碍患者。我们讨论了为什么超绑定仅在隐含测试条件下才明显，以及它如何影响日常事件的记忆。尽管超结合可能会导致遗忘，但当看似无关的关联后来变得相关时，它也可能赋予某些优势。