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Special Report on the 2020 Keynote Address
Summary by Laura Mickes, Digital Content Editor
This recap is part of a special series of session summaries from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.
And We're Off! Virtual Psychonomics Kicks Off with Lynn Hasher's Keynote Address
We were supposed to convene in Austin, Texas, USA (yeehaw!) for the 2020 Annual Meeting
of the Psychonomic Society. Some of us were looking forward to visiting
the city for the first time or returning to old haunts. We were all
certainly looking forward to hearing about the new science (some while
fighting mind-numbing jet lag). I suspect that most of us were looking
forward to seeing old friends/colleagues and making new ones while
discussing old and new ideas and findings in cognitive science. I would
have been treated to a delectable dinner, making up for the fact that
the Annual Meeting co-opts my birthday each year.
COVID-19
diverted these plans and the stark contrast of what we come to expect
and what we face now is clear in Jim Pomerantz’s (Psychonomic Society’s
Governing Board Chair) introduction. Meeting online is such a change from our in-person gatherings. Just look at that image on the left, a picture from last year's Diversity & Inclusion Reception in Montreal! 
We
can – and should – thank the many vital people whose great efforts
allow us to disseminate and discuss our research virtually in ways that
rival our face-to-face meetings. Thank you!
Let
me set the stage: Hasher was actually on a stage! Watching her keynote
will make you feel as if you’re in the conference center watching in
real-life and in the flesh. (Nice touch, Psychonomic Society.) 
Hasher’s
keynote was titled "TMI: Disengagement and Memory." If you’re
unfamiliar with the initialism, TMI stands for “too much information.”
According to dictionary.com, TMI
has two meanings: sharing inappropriate personal details, and a “reaction to an overload of information.” You are probably familiar with the former definition, having been either
guilty of imparting TMI or on the cringeworthy receiving end of it. Hasher’s research pertains to the latter definition.
Hasher
and Zacks proposed "Inhibitory Theory," and situates inhibition as a
critical part of cognitive control. According to the theory, inhibition
functions to:
- filter out irrelevant information,
- disengage when information is no longer relevant, and
- suppress competing information.
In
her keynote, Hasher covered results from a series of experiments
designed to test the theory by comparing young and older adults'
performance on implicit memory tests. We are all aware of the research,
and maybe the anecdotal evidence, that as we age, our memory isn't as good as when we were young. But is there a bright side?
One
intriguing finding from Hasher’s vast body of research, and
complementary research conducted in other labs, is that younger, but not
older, adults inhibit distracting information across tests. This lack
of inhibition, depending on the nature of the distraction, could boost
or harm performance.
In
the left figure below, older adults outperformed younger adults with
related distractors. In the middle figure below, older adults’ reading
time was differentially slowed by distractions. As shown in the right
figure below, unlike young adults whose frontoparietal, or attention,
networks were activated in the presence of distractors, there was no
such activation for the older adults. These findings support the idea
that as we get older inhibition reduces. 
In
addition to filtering out irrelevant information, another function of
inhibition is disengaging. It’s often advantageous to disengage with
information no longer relevant. Though when information was no longer
needed, older adults continued to engage with it. Hasher and colleagues
found that older adults encoded distractions but could use that
information to improve performance. But the younger adults didn’t.
When
information with distractions is encoded and participants later take a
test for that information, older adults outperformed younger adults,
whether it was a word fragment completion test (left figure below) or a
general knowledge priming test (right figure below). Older adults didn’t
use inhibition like younger adults and used distraction to improve
their performance. By doing so, the older adults outperformed younger
adults. 
The
final function of inhibition is to suppress irrelevant information.
Young adults suppressed competing information, and older adults
strengthened competing information. Upon further investigation, Hasher
and colleagues found that older adults had more hippocampal activity for
the irrelevant items during delays. Hasher discussed how she and
colleagues used these findings to successfully improve older adults’
memory by presenting distractions during rehearsal.
To
succinctly sum it up, older adults have TMI. To the older adults’
superior performance, Hasher said, “Another shout out to my peeps.”
Learning about the findings from Hasher’s body of research is a welcome
birthday gift this year and makes up for the fact that I don’t get to
enjoy birthday distractions in person with my fellow Psychonomes this
year.
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