Mnemonic Bridging across Events Relates to Individual-Differences in Sustained Attention in Younger and Older Adults

Episodic memory enables novel inferences that bridge across experiences. A goal of memory science is to understand the factors that give rise to individual and group differences in memory-dependent cognition. In two experiments, we examined associative inference performance in young and older adults and how differences in sustained attention relate to differences in memory and inference. We report lower associative memory and inference performance in older compared to young adults; strikingly, age-related reductions in associative inference occur even when controlling for associative memory and in the absence of group-differences in attention. At the same time, we report that individual differences in sustained attention explain between-person variability in memory and inference performance. While age-related reductions in associative memory and inference performance can occur independent of attention, individual differences in the propensity to suffer attention lapses partially explain why some young and older adults remember and bridge across experiences better than others.