Memory for people and their actions: further evidence for an age-related associative deficit.

The associative deficit hypothesis (M. Naveh-Benjamin, 2000) attributes age-related memory deficits to the inability to encode and retrieve bound units of information. The present experiment extended this deficit to a new form of stimuli, dynamic displays of people and their performance of everyday actions. Older and younger adults viewed a series of brief video clips, each showing a different person performing a different action, and were tested over memory for individual people, individual actions, and the person-action combinations. Older adults did exhibit an associative deficit, and this was related to an increased proportion of false alarms on the associative test.