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Rule and Exception Learning in Healthy Older Adults

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Cheyna Warner¹ (), Lainey Costa, Isabella Zuniga, Ulrich Mayr, Dagmar Zeithamova; ¹University of Oregon

Healthy cognitive aging is associated with impaired memory specificity but relatively intact general memory. The extent to which age affects the active process of memory generalization, or extracting commonalities across experiences, is less clear. Prior research on concept learning demonstrates that older and younger adults are able to learn and generalize category structures. Yet, younger adults often outperform their older adult counterparts, putatively because they supplement their category knowledge by memorizing some category members. Here, we tested older and younger adult participants’ abilities to learn unidimensional rules with or without the presence of exceptions. Young and older participants completed either a rule + exception learning task or rule-only learning task, using the same stimuli. Unidimensional rules in the rule-only learning task were learned just as well by both age groups. Rule + exception task showed not only impaired exception learning (specificity) but also impaired rule learning (generalization) in older adults. Findings indicate that tasks that concurrently rely on generalization and specificity may impact generalization in older adults. These results highlight the complex pattern of impairments in memory specificity and generalization in health cognitive aging.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging