Abstract
Hyper-binding is shown when irrelevant information is processed and bound to relevant information and this binding carries over to a subsequent task. For example, when participants perform a 1-back task with line drawings superimposed with irrelevant words, and then are later asked to perform an ostensibly unrelated paired-associate memory task with picture-word pairs, their memory is better for pairs that appeared in the 1-back task than for rearranged pairs or novel pairs. Hyper-binding has been repeatedly observed in older (60+ years) participants but not in younger (<30 years) participants and has been attributed to older individuals’ failure to filter out irrelevant information. However, an individual’s emotions can influence how they attend to and process information, and older individuals have been shown to have a positivity bias in that they report greater positive affect than their younger counterparts. Low arousal positive affect is associated with greater cognitive breadth where individuals are more inclusive and take in more irrelevant information. Therefore, it is possible that differences in positive affect contribute to the differences in hyper-binding observed for older versus younger adults. In a series of four studies, we measure hyper-binding using the above task and examine whether individual differences in hyper-binding can be predicted by individual differences in self-reported state or trait affect. No relationships were found between affect and hyper-binding amongst older adults, university undergraduate students, or middle-aged adults, or when examined across age samples. Surprisingly, significant hyper-binding was observed for all age groups and was not larger for older individuals. The results suggest that hyper-binding does not result from greater positive affect but that it may not be a unique age effect.