The effect of emotional distraction on hyper-binding in young and older adults

Our cognitive system implicitly binds relevant stimulus features into a coherent episodic event. According to past research, relative to young adults, older adults are more likely to hyper-bind extraneous co-occurrences and tend to prioritise positive over negative information. However, the interaction of these cognitive and emotional processes is unknown. The current study thus examined the influence of emotion on age-related hyper-binding. Participants completed a 1-back task for neutral target pictures paired with positive, negative, or neutral distractor words. After a delay, participants completed a paired-associate learning task for pairs that were either preserved or disrupted from the 1-back task, followed by a cued-recall test for those pairs. Compared to young adults, older adults showed better recall of preserved neutral pairs relative to disrupted neutral pairs, replicating the age-related hyper-binding effect. Interestingly, whereas older adults did not hyper-bind emotional pairs, young adults showed hyper-binding of negative pairs, but not positive or neutral. This implies that young adults may also implicitly bind irrelevant co-occurrences when they include negative information. Consistent with a negativity bias in youth, negative words may have captured young adults’ attention, facilitating binding of pairs. These findings highlight the need to consider emotional effects on age differences in cognitive processing.