Diane Chao: Effect of reward motivation on directed forgetting in younger and older adults

An important feature of the memory system is the ability to forget, but aging is associated with declines in the ability to intentionally forget. Despite known cognitive deficits, sensitivity to affective manipulations are maintained in older age, for example, reward motivation can improve older adults' memory. Using a directed forgetting paradigm, we tested whether reward motivation could improve intentional forgetting in young and older adults. Participants were shown a sequence of words with instructions to remember (TBR) or forget (TBF) to earn a high ($.75) or low ($.01) reward. For older adults, there was no evidence that reward motivation improved cognitive control as high value reward anticipation did not improve directed forgetting. Instead, the findings are in line with hypotheses, that high value reward anticipation leads to better memory regardless of the TBR or TBF cue. Reward may bolster memory in an automatic fashion, overriding cognitive control of encoding processes.