Ageing and the group-reference effect in memory

Abstract

The present study examines age differences in the memory benefits from group-referncing. While prior work establishes that the memory performance of younger and older adults similarly benefits from relating information to the self, this study assessed whether those benefits extend to referencing a meaningful group membership. Young and older adult participants encoded trait words by judging whether each word describes themselves, describes their group membership (selected for each age group), or is familiar. After a retention interval, participants completed a surprise recognition memory test. The results indicate that group-referencing increased recognition memory performance compared to the familiarity judgements for both young and older groups. However, the group-reference benefit is limited, emerging as smaller than the benefit from self-referencing. These results challenge previous findings of equivalent benefits for group-referencing and self-referencing, suggesting that such effects may not prevail under all conditions, including for older adults. The findings also highlight the need to examine the mechanisms of group-referencing that can lead to variability in the group-reference effect.

Keywords:

• Memory
• Ageing
• Group-referencing
• Self-referencing
• Group identity

Acknowledgement

We thank Rebekah LaFontant, Jung Park and Alex Sheehan for their assistance and Drs Leslie Zebrowitz, Joe Cunningham and Joann Montepare for their helpful comments and suggestions. Hyeon-Nyeon Lee is now located at Duksung Women's University, Seoul, South Korea.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Psychology at Brandeis University.

ORCID

Angela Gutchess http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3047-5907

Notes

¹ N = 56 for older adults, because encoding files could not be recovered for two participants.

²Mauchly's test indicated that the assumption of sphericity had been violated (χ² = 13.087), therefore degrees of freedom were corrected using Huynh-Feldt estimates of sphericity (ε = .87).