Hyper-binding: the surprising roles of age and affect.

When irrelevant stimuli are processed and then bound to relevant stimuli in memory, it is known as hyper-binding. Hyper-binding has been demonstrated consistently in older-aged participants, but university-aged participants do not typically show hyper-binding. This phenomenon has been attributed to older individuals having greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant information compared to younger adults. Emotions can also influence how individuals attend to and process information, and older individuals report feeling greater positive, and less negative, affect than younger adults. Low arousal positive affect is associated with greater cognitive breadth and reduced distractor suppression. Therefore, it is possible that differences in affect contribute to the differences in hyper-binding demonstrated for younger versus older adults. In four studies, we measured hyper-binding using a standard hyper-binding task and examined whether individual differences in hyper-binding could be predicted by individual differences in self-reported affect. Study 1 included an online community sample between 18 and 45 years of age. Study 2 included university undergraduate students that were tested online. Study 3 participants included university undergraduate students that were tested in the lab. Study 4 participants included an older aged sample that was tested online. Overall, there were no significant relationships between affect and hyper-binding across age samples. Surprisingly, however, significant hyper-binding was observed for all age groups and was not larger for older individuals. The results suggest that individual differences in naturally occurring affect do not meaningfully predict hyper-binding, but the prevalence of hyper-binding across all studies demonstrates it may not be unique to older adults.
Competing Interests: Declarations Conflict of interests The authors declare no competing interests. Neither author has any competing interests or conflicts of interest with respect to the content of this manuscript.Ethical approval and consent to participateEthics clearance has been given by the Brock University Research Ethics Board. Participants have read the exclusion criteria listed on the online posting and consent form. They were run through the experiment after giving their informed consent to participate and were debriefed after their participation. Clearance (REB # 19–250). All procedures conformed to the standards of the Declaration Helsinki. Consent for publication This manuscript does not contain data from individual participants. Participants provided informed consent for the data to be presented in the format used here.
(© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)