Strategies to Improve Visual Feature Binding in Younger and Older Adults

Prior research has shown that drawing, tracing, and describing at encoding are beneficial strategies for improving subsequent visual object recognition. It is unclear whether these strategies are also beneficial for the binding of object features in visual memory and how their benefits may vary with age. In these experiments, participants learned object images through either drawing a copy of the image, writing a description of the image, tracing the image, or simply studying the image. Subsequently, participants had an old/new recognition test and a test of object feature binding (indicating where the object was located and what color the object was). This experiment was conducted with younger adults and older adults. For the younger adults, drawing and describing were the best strategies for both object recognition and object feature binding. For the older adults, drawing and describing were the best strategies for object recognition, while studying and describing were the best strategies for object feature binding. For both groups, tracing was not beneficial for feature binding. Overall, these results show that the optimal learning strategy depends on the way the information will be tested and the learner population.