BRIEF REPORT A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words? Not When It Comes to Associative Memory of Older Adults Jonathan Guez Beer-Sheva Mental Health Center, Beer-Sheva, Israel, and Achva Academic College Dror Lev Psychological Service of Rechasim Municipality, Israel Properties of the binding mechanism in associative recognition were studied by examining the influence of the pictorial superiority effect on the age-related associative deficit. The informative aspect of associative recognition is the recollection of the pairing. Previous findings indicate that recollection is susceptible to aging and that pictorial presentation can enhance recollection and facilitate associative recognition. Pictorial presentation was found to facilitate item recognition by both young and older adults, associative recognition by young adults, but not associative recognition by older adults. Our findings support the hypothesis that the binding mechanism in associative recognition is content independent. Theoretical implications are discussed. Keywords: aging, associative recognition, words and pictorial presentation, binding, picture superiority effect According to the associative deficit hypothesis (ADH; Naveh- Benjamin, 2000), older adults’ poorer episodic memory is, to a large extent, due to deficiencies in the creation and retrieval of associations, rather than a difficulty in encoding and retrieving of individual components (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000; Old & Naveh- Benjamin, 2008). Arguably, the locus of the deterioration in the capacity of older adults to maintain episodic memories is the result of a defect in the binding mechanism of recollection. Previous studies examining the ADH indicate the existence of an age-sensitive binding mechanism with unique characteristics. The fundamental claim of the ADH is that aging introduces decline in associative memory performance, which exceeds the age-related decline in item recognition (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). This phe- nomenon has been linked to deterioration in the brain pathways of recollection, which develops with aging (Jennings & Jacoby, 1997; Light, 2012; Light, Prull, LaVoie, & Healy, 2000; Yonelinas, 2002). In a meta-analysis, Old and Naveh-Benjamin (2008) found that the ADH was confirmed in numerous studies using different materials and methods, and examining different types of associa- tions. Furthermore, they found the pattern of age-related associa- tive deficit (ARAD) to be similar, whether the stimuli were verbal (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin, 2000; Kilb & Naveh-Benjamin, 2007) or nonverbal, as in pictorial stimuli (Bayen, Phelps, & Spaniol, 2000; Naveh-Benjamin, Hussain, Guez, & Bar-On, 2003). Given the various types of stimuli and contexts that have been utilized in the studies that found ARAD, it is likely that this deficit is content independent. In this work we apply, in one design and within subjects, both verbal and pictorial stimuli, and assess the ARAD simultaneously for words and pictures. The multimodal investiga- tion of the ADH enables us to directly test the existence of a binding mechanism, in episodic memory recollection, that is age dependent and content independent. The idea of a general associative mechanism is supported by different imaging studies, testing source memory with different stim- uli and point on some common regions, including the medial temporal lobe (MTL), prefrontal cortex, and posterior parietal cortex (see Mitchell & Johnson, 2009, for a review). The hippocampus is part of the recollection process pathway and a component of the MTL that is central to the association of information units and their context (Eichenbaum, Sauvage, Fortin, Komorowski, & Lipton, 2012). Re- cent investigation of content representation in the MTL (Liang, Wag- ner, & Preston, 2013) showed that a part of the hippocampus is content general, and another part has more sensitivity to visual scenes. In another study of the recollection brain pathway (Johnson, Suzuki, & Rugg, 2013), the authors concluded that recollection-based epi- sodic recognition relies on both content-sensitive and content- insensitive processes. Studies of the picture superiority effect (PSE; Shepard, 1967; reviewed by Mintzer & Snodgrass, 1999) established that the presen- tation of pictures, rather than words, has a beneficial effect on item recognition. Recently, Hockley showed that the PSE also prevail in associative recognition of young adults (Hockley, 2008; Hockley & Bancroft, 2011). This article was published Online First January 11, 2016. Jonathan Guez, Beer-Sheva Mental Health Center, Beer-Sheva, Israel, and Department of Psychology, Achva Academic College; Dror Lev, Psychological Service of Rechasim Municipality, Israel. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jon- athan Guez, Department of Psychology, Achva Academic College, Be’er-Tuvia Regional Council, M.P.O. Shikmim 79800, Israel. E-mail: jonjon@bgu.ac.il This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Psychology and Aging © 2016 American Psychological Association 2016, Vol. 31, No. 1, 37– 41 0882-7974/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pag0000069 37