Jennifer N. Sexton ^* Lillian Behm Jill A Rose Connor J Phipps Meghan K Ramirez Abi M Heller-Wight Anna F Wilhelm Emma A Armbruster Carolyn E Nagengast David E Warren ^*

• University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, United States

Cognitive changes accompany normal aging, and certain types of memory are particularly susceptible to age-related change. The ability to link aspects of an experience to form one cohesive memory (relational memory) is essential to healthy aging. Relational memory facilitates the binding of arbitrarily related stimuli and encompasses all manner of relations (spatial, associative, sequential). Prior work has studied differences in relational memory associated with aging but has investigated specific aspects of relational memory in a siloed fashion: earlier studies typically have not simultaneously assessed multiple aspects of relational memory in the same participants in the same paradigm. In the current study, performance was compared on a simultaneous test of multiple aspects of relational memory between healthy younger adults (19-35 years, n = 40) and healthy older adults (65-77 years, n = 40). We found that older adults had reduced memory performance relative to younger adults on each condition of the task (item condition, space condition, re-pair condition, and time condition), and there was a condition by age group interaction. Older adults and younger adults alike performed less well on the re-pair condition relative to the space and time relational conditions. Together, these findings underscore the importance of measuring all manner of relations after the same study format to achieve a thorough characterization of the complex nuances of relational memory performance.