# Unitization Based Memory Enhancement in Younger and Older Adults

## TL;DR

The study explores how unitization, a memory strategy, can help older adults retain information better by integrating unrelated items into a single entity.

## Contribution

The study provides empirical evidence that unitization can enhance associative memory in older adults when binding information is provided.

## Key findings

- Associative memory improved when participants encoded unrelated word pairs using definitions that unitized them.
- Self-generated binding information led to a general memory advantage but did not enhance unitization effects.
- Unitization's effectiveness depends on the availability of binding information and may not generalize beyond lab settings.

## Abstract

Memory for episodic associations declines with ageing due to decreased recollection abilities. Unitization—the encoding of multiple items as one integrated entity—has been shown to support familiarity-based retrieval that is independent of recollection and is relatively preserved in healthy ageing. Accordingly, unitization has been proposed as a promising strategy to attenuate age-related associative deficits, but evidence regarding its utility was lacking. The current study aimed to establish unitization as a viable mnemonic strategy. First, to ensure that unitization can attenuate the age-related associative deficit for initially unrelated materials, top-down unitization was used. Namely, participants were given an initially unrelated word pair in the context of either a definition which allows the words to be encoded as a unitized compound or a sentence in which the words are encoded as separate entities. Second, to ensure that unitization can be used as a self-initiated strategy, participants also completed the task by generating their own binding information (definitions/sentences). As expected, a unitization effect had emerged, such that associative memory was enhanced following definition encoding. However, this effect only occurred when binding information was provided. Additionally, a general memory advantage for the self-generation condition had emerged, but this was (generally) similar across unitization conditions and age groups. Taken together, the results show that unitization can be used as a mnemonic strategy under certain conditions, and highlight additional steps that should be taken before it can be effectively used beyond lab settings.