# Tactile memory impairments in younger and older adults

## TL;DR

The study finds that older adults have specific difficulties reaching peak performance in tactile memory tasks, while both younger and older adults favor known over new tactile information.

## Contribution

The paper introduces new models of tactile memory storage and recall in younger and older adults.

## Key findings

- Older adults show weak impairments in tactile memory precision and bias but struggle to reach peak performance above 85%.
- Both younger and older adults exhibit a pattern completion bias, favoring known tactile information over new.
- The findings suggest age-related changes in how tactile memories are stored and retrieved.

## Abstract

Human tactile memory allows us to remember and retrieve the multitude of somatosensory experiences we undergo in everyday life. An unsolved question is how tactile memory mechanisms change with increasing age. We here use the ability to remember fine-grained tactile patterns passively presented to the fingertip to investigate age-related changes in tactile memory performance. In experiment 1, we varied the degree of similarity between one learned and several new tactile patterns to test on age-related changes in the “uniqueness” of a stored tactile memory trace. In experiment 2, we varied the degree of stimulus completeness of both known and new tactile patterns to test on age-related changes in the weighting between known and novel tactile information. Results reveal that older adults show only weak impairments in both precision and bias of tactile memories, however, they show specific deficits in reaching peak performance > 85% in both experiments. In addition, both younger and older adults show a pattern completion bias for touch, indicating a higher weighting of known compared to new information. These results allow us to develop new models on how younger and older adults store and recall tactile experiences of the past, and how this influences their everyday behavior.