Aging and autobiographical memory: Dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval.

Cognitive aging research documents reduced access to contextually specific episodic details in older adults, whereas access to semantic or other nonepisodic information is preserved or facilitated. The present study extended this finding to autobiographical memory by using a new measure: the Autobiographical Interview. Younger and older adults recalled events from 5 life periods. Protocols were scored according to a reliable system for categorizing episodic and nonepisodic information. Whereas younger adults were biased toward episodic details reflecting happenings, locations, perceptions, and thoughts, older adults favored semantic details not connected to a particular time and place. This pattern persisted after additional structured probing for contextual details. The Autobiographical Interview is a useful instrument for quantifying episodic and semantic contributions to personal remote memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic simulation of past and future events in older adults: Evidence from an experimental recombination task.

We recently reported that older adults generate fewer episodic details than younger adults when remembering past events and when simulating future events. We suggested that the simulation findings reveal an age deficit in recombining episodic details into novel events, but they could also result from older adults “recasting” entire past events as future events. In this study, we used an experimental recombination paradigm to prevent recasting while imagining and to compare imagining the future with imagining the past. Older adults generated fewer episodic details for imagined and recalled events than younger adults, thereby extending the age-related simulation deficit to conditions of recombination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging, source memory, and misrecollections.

The authors propose an illusory recollection account of why cognitive aging is associated with episodic memory deficits. After listening to statements presented by either a female or a male speaker, older adults were prone to misrecollecting past events. The authors' illusory recollection account is instantiated in a new illusory recollection signal detection model that provides a better fit of older adults' data than does the standard signal detection model. They observed that age-related differences in source memory (as measured by source d′ scores) virtually disappear after accounting for the occurrence of illusory recollections. These data suggest that age-related source memory impairments are not due to older adults' remembering less diagnostic source information and having to guess more. Instead, older adults appear to misremember past events more often than younger adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tracking the construction of episodic future thoughts.

The ability to mentally simulate possible futures (episodic future thinking) is of fundamental importance for various aspects of human cognition and behavior, but precisely how humans construct mental representations of future events is still essentially unknown. We suggest that episodic future thoughts consist of transitory patterns of activation over knowledge structures at different levels of specificity, with general knowledge about the personal future (i.e., personal semantic information and anticipated general events) providing a context or frame for retrieving, integrating, and interpreting episodic details. In line with this hypothesis, Study 1 showed that the construction of episodic future thoughts is frequently a protracted generative process in which general personal knowledge is accessed before episodic details. We then explored in more detail the nature of this general personal knowledge and tested the hypothesis that it is mainly organized in terms of personal goals. Study 2 showed that cuing participants with knowledge about personal goals increased the ease of future event production during a fluency task. Study 3 further demonstrated that cuing participants with their personal goals facilitated access to episodic details during the imagination of future events. Taken together, these findings indicate that general personal knowledge and, in particular, knowledge about personal goals plays an important role in the construction of episodic future thoughts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related deficits in reality monitoring of action memories.

The authors describe 3 theoretical accounts of age-related increases in falsely remembering that imagined actions were performed (A. K. Thomas & J. B. Bulevich, 2006). To investigate these accounts and further explore age-related changes in reality monitoring of action memories, the authors used a new paradigm in which actions were (a) imagined only, (b) actually performed, or (c) both imagined and performed. Older adults were more likely than younger adults to misremember the source of imagined-only actions, with older adults more often specifying that the action was imagined and also that it was performed. For both age groups, illusions that the actions were only performed decreased as repetitions of the imagined-only events increased. These patterns suggest that both older and younger adults use qualitative characteristics when making reality-monitoring judgments and that repeated imagination produces richer records of both sensory details and cognitive operations. However, sensory information derived from imagination appears to be more similar to that derived from performance for older adults than for younger adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do younger and older adults’ communicative goals influence off-topic speech in autobiographical narratives?

The present research investigated younger and older adults’ communicative goals and their effects on off-topic speech for autobiographical narratives. Participants indicated their communicative goals by rating preferences among paired goals, for example, focus–fascinating, one of which was designated as an expressive goal, appropriate for producing elaborative speech, and one of which was an objective goal, suited to producing concise speech. The participants then told stories about episodic and procedural topics, which were rated by groups of younger and older listeners. Age differences emerged in communicative goals, where younger adults clearly favored expressive goals for episodic topics and objective goals for procedural topics. In contrast, older adults’ goals were more diverse, consisting of a mixture of expressive and objective goals for both topic types, without a clear preference. Younger adults’ goals predicted ratings of off-topic speech assessed by listeners: Younger and older adults were perceived as equivalently focused, coherent, and clear for episodic topics, but older adults were perceived as less focused, less clear, and more talkative than younger adults on procedural topics. These results suggest that age-related changes in off-topic speech emerge as a result of younger adults selecting goals designed to produce more succinct stories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging, metamemory, and high-confidence errors: A misrecollection account.

Two experiments showed that older adults were worse than younger adults at judging the accuracy of their responses on source identification (i.e., who said what) and cued-recall tests. It is important to note that this age-related metamonitoring impairment occurred even after older and younger adults were matched on overall source accuracy and cued-recall accuracy. By contrast, older and younger adults showed comparable metamonitoring capacities when assessing the likely accuracy of old-new recognition judgments and responses to questions about general knowledge. These experiments are consistent with the misrecollection account of cognitive aging, which suggests that age-related memory impairments are due to older adults' vulnerability to making high-confidence errors when answering questions that require memory for specific details about recently learned events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effective cue utilization reduces memory errors in older adults.

When compared with younger adults, older adults typically manifest poorer episodic memory. One hypothesis for the episodic memory deficit is that older adults may not encode contextual information as well as younger adults. Alternatively, older adults may use contextual information at retrieval less effectively when compared with younger adults. If older adults encode context less well than younger adults, then manipulations that affect context should have little effect on memory performance. To evaluate these 2 hypotheses, the authors used manipulations that promoted effective contextual cue utilization at retrieval. Retention interval and instructions at retrieval were manipulated within the imagination inflation paradigm. Results suggest that older adults encode contextual cues useful in improving memory performance but have difficulty accessing and using those cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging, episodic memory feeling-of-knowing, and frontal functioning.

Groups of normal old and young adults made episodic memory feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments and took 2 types of episodic memory tests (cued recall and recognition). Neuropsychological tests of executive and memory functions thought to respectively involve the frontal and medial temporal structures were also administered. Age differences were observed on the episodic memory measures and on all neuropsychological tests. Compared with young adults, older adults performed at chance level on FOK accuracy judgments. Partial correlations indicated that a composite measure of frontal functioning and FOK accuracy were closely related. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that the composite frontal functioning score accounted for a large proportion of the age-related variance in FOK accuracy. This finding supports the idea that the age-related decline in episodic memory FOK accuracy is mainly the result of executive or frontal limitations associated with aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and recollection in the accuracy of judgments of learning.

Dual-process theories propose that episodic memory performance reflects both recollection of prior details as well as more automatic influences of the past. The authors explored the idea that recollection mediates the accuracy of judgments of learning (JOLs) and may also help explain age differences in JOL accuracy. Young and older adults made immediate JOLs at study and then completed recognition or recall tests that included a recollect/familiar judgment. JOLs were found to be strongly related to recollected items but not to items remembered on the basis of familiarity. The pattern was weaker in older adults, consistent with age-related declines in recollection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic priming and memory for temporal source: Event-related potentials reveal age-related differences in prefrontal functioning.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from young (M?=?25) and older (M?=?71) adults during a recognition memory paradigm that assessed episodic priming. Participants studied two temporally distinct lists of sentences (each with two unassociated nouns). At test, in response to the nouns, participants made old–new, followed by remember (context)–know (familiarity) and source (i.e., list) judgments. Both young and older adults showed equivalent episodic priming effects. However, compared to the young adults, the older adults showed a greater source performance decrement than item memory performance decrement. Both age groups showed equivalent posterior-maximal old-new ERP effects. However, only the young produced a frontal-maximal, late onset old-new effect that differed as a function of subsequent list attribution. Because source memory is thought to be mediated by prefrontal cortex, we conclude that age-related memory differences may be due to a deficit in a prefrontal cortical system that underlies source memory and are not likely to be due to an age-related decline in episodic priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differential effects of age on item and associative measures of memory: A meta-analysis.

In this meta-analysis, the authors evaluated recent suggestions that older adults' episodic memory impairments are partially due to a reduced ability to encode and retrieve associated/bound units of information. Results of 90 studies of episodic memory for both item and associative information in 3,197 young and 3,192 older adults provided support for the age-related associative/binding deficit suggestion, indicating a larger effect of age on memory for associative information than for item information. Moderators assessed included the type of associations, encoding instructions, materials, and test format. Results indicated an age-related associative deficit in memory for source, context, temporal order, spatial location, and item pairings, in both verbal and nonverbal material. An age-related associative deficit was quite pronounced under intentional learning instructions but was not clearly evident under incidental learning instructions. Finally, test format was also found to moderate the associative deficit, with older adults showing an associative/binding deficit when item memory was evaluated via recognition tests but not when item memory was evaluated via recall tests, in which case the age-related deficits were similar for item and associative information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How many memory systems? Evidence from aging.

The present research tested Tulving's (1985) ternary memory theory. Young (ages 19–32) and older (ages 63–80) adults were given procedural, semantic, and episodic memory tasks. Repetition, lag, and codability were manipulated in a picture-naming task, followed by incidental memory tests. Relative to young adults, older adults exhibited lower levels of recall and recognition, but these episodic measures increased similarly as a function of lag and repetition in both age groups. No age-related deficits emerged in either semantic memory (vocabulary, latency slopes, naming errors and tip-of-the-tongue responses) or procedural memory (repetition priming magnitude and rate of decline). In addition to the age by memory task dissociations, the manipulation of codability produced slower naming latencies and more naming errors (semantic memory), yet promoted better recall and recognition (episodic memory). Finally, a factor analysis of 11 memory measures revealed three distinct factors, providing additional support for a tripartite memory model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neuroanatomical and cognitive mediators of age-related differences in episodic memory.

Aging is associated with declines in episodic memory. In this study, the authors used a path analysis framework to explore the mediating role of differences in brain structure, executive functions, and processing speed in age-related differences in episodic memory. Measures of regional brain volume (prefrontal gray and white matter, caudate, hippocampus, visual cortex), executive functions (working memory, inhibitory control, task switching, temporal processing), processing speed, and episodic memory were obtained in a sample of young and older adults. As expected, age was linked to reduction in regional brain volumes and cognitive performance. Moreover, neural and cognitive factors completely mediated age differences in episodic memory. Whereas hippocampal shrinkage directly affected episodic memory, prefrontal volumetric reductions influenced episodic memory via limitations in working memory and inhibitory control. Age-related slowing predicted reduced efficiency in temporal processing, working memory, and inhibitory control. Lastly, poorer temporal processing directly affected episodic memory. No direct effects of age on episodic memory remained once these factors were taken into account. These analyses highlight the value of a multivariate approach with the understanding of complex relationships in cognitive and brain aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and flexible remembering: Contributions of conceptual span, fluid intelligence, and frontal functioning.

Aging attenuates the capacity to adaptively and flexibly use episodic memory at different levels of specificity. Older and younger adults were tested on a picture recognition task that required them to make episodic memory decisions at an item-specific (verbatim) versus category-based (gist-based) level on randomly intermixed trials. Specificity modulation was assessed using a measure of the likelihood that participants retrieved verbatim information in order to reject test items that were categorically related to studied items under item-specific recognition instructions (recollection rejection). We found that this measure positively correlated with conceptual span (an index of short-term semantic memory) and with level of fluid intelligence in older and younger adults. However, when we simultaneously considered each of four possible contributors (age, conceptual span, fluid intelligence, and frontal function), the only significant predictor of recollection rejection was the composite fluid intelligence measure (assessed by the Culture Fair Intelligence Test [Cattell & Cattell, 1960] and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Revised Block Design subtest [Wechsler, 1981]). These findings suggest that interventions that facilitate adaptive specificity modulation in episodic memory may enhance the flexibility of thinking, and vice versa, in both older and younger adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of attention on age-related relational memory deficits: Evidence from a novel attentional manipulation.

Healthy aging is often accompanied by episodic memory decline. Prior studies have consistently demonstrated that older adults show disproportionate deficits in relational memory (RM) relative to item memory (IM). Despite rich evidence of an age-related RM deficit, the source of this deficit remains unspecified. One of the most widely investigated factors of age-related RM impairment is a reduction in attentional resources. However, no prior studies have demonstrated that reduced attentional resources are the critical source of age-related RM deficits. Here, we used qualitatively different attention tasks and tested whether reduced attention for relational processing underlies the RM deficit observed in aging. In Experiment 1, we imposed either item-detection or relation-detection attention tasks on young adults during episodic memory encoding and found that only the concurrent attention task that involves relational processing disproportionately impaired RM performance in young adults. Moreover, by ruling out the possible confound of task difficulty on the disproportionate RM impairment, we further demonstrated that reduced relational attention is a key factor for the age-related RM deficit. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results from Experiment 1 by using different materials of stimuli and found that the effect of relational attention on RM is material general. The results of Experiment 2 also showed that reducing attentional resources for relational processing in young adults strikingly equated their RM performance to that of older adults. Thus, this study documents the first evidence that reduced attentional resources for relational processing are a critical factor for the relational memory impairment observed in aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related changes in imitating sequences of observed movements.

Three experiments investigated the size and sources of age-related changes in visual imitation. In Experiment 1, young and older adults viewed sequences of quasi-random movements and then reproduced from memory what they had seen. As expected, older adults made more errors in imitation than their younger counterparts. However, older adults seemed to supplement their memory by exploiting an abstracted representation (gist) of a sequence. Experiments 2 and 3 apportioned the observed age-related changes in imitation performance among several possible causes. Experiment 2 showed that changes in precision of visual perception and motor control together accounted for only a small fraction of age-related changes in imitation quality; Experiment 3 showed that the bulk of the age-related changes arose from the older participants’ reduced ability to accommodate for increases in memory load, likely caused by diminished ability to encode or retain detailed information about movement sequences. Guided by these results, strategies are proposed for enhancing older adults’ imitation learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A diffusion model analysis of adult age differences in episodic and semantic long-term memory retrieval.

Two experiments investigated adult age differences in episodic and semantic long-term memory tasks, as a test of the hypothesis of specific age-related decline in context memory. Older adults were slower and exhibited lower episodic accuracy than younger adults. Fits of the diffusion model (R. Ratcliff, 1978) revealed age-related increases in nondecisional reaction time for both episodic and semantic retrieval. In Experiment 2, an age difference in boundary separation also indicated an age-related increase in conservative criterion setting. For episodic old-new recognition (Experiment 1) and source memory (Experiment 2), there was an age-related decrease in the quality of decision-driving information (drift rate). As predicted by the context-memory deficit hypothesis, there was no corresponding age-related decline in semantic drift rate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

More data-driven processing at retrieval reduces age-related memory deficits.

The environmental support hypothesis postulates that it may be possible to reduce older adults' deficits in episodic memory by providing environmental support at the encoding and/or retrieval phases. To examine the validity of this hypothesis, we varied the amount of retrieval support by manipulating data-driven processes. Young and older adults performed a word-stem cued recall task under a low data-driven condition (LDDC) in which the retrieval cue comprised 3 letters, and a higher data-driven condition (HDDC) in which the cue comprised 4 letters. Older adults benefitted more than younger adults from the additional support. Older adults exhibited a large deficit relative to younger adults in the LDDC condition but no age differences were found in the HDDC condition. These findings demonstrate that age-related memory deficits can be reduced by increasing the environmental support at retrieval associated with the data-driven component of retrieval processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differential effects of age on involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memory.

Research on aging and autobiographical memory has focused almost exclusively on voluntary autobiographical memory. However, in everyday life, autobiographical memories often come to mind spontaneously without deliberate attempt to retrieve anything. In the present study, diary and word-cue methods were used to compare the involuntary and voluntary memories of 44 young and 38 older adults. The results showed that older adults reported fewer involuntary and voluntary memories than did younger adults. Additionally, the life span distribution of involuntary and voluntary memories did not differ in young adults (a clear recency effect) or in older adults (a recency effect and a reminiscence bump). Despite these similarities between involuntary and voluntary memories, there were also important differences in terms of the effects of age on some memory characteristics. Thus, older adults’ voluntary memories were less specific and were recalled more slowly than those of young adults, but there were no reliable age differences in the specificity of involuntary memories. Moreover, older adults rated their involuntary memories as more positive than did young adults, but this positivity effect was not found for voluntary memories. Theoretical implications of these findings for research on autobiographical memory and cognitive aging are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)