Deciphering the relationship between objective and subjective aspects of recollection in healthy aging

ABSTRACT

Although healthy aging has been related to a decline in recollection as indexed by objective measures, the subjective experience of recollection sometimes remains stable. To date, however, these age-related differences have only been examined using aggregated data across trials. In the current study, we investigated the relationship between subjective and objective measures of recollection on a trial-by-trial basis to determine whether the magnitude of this relationship was similar in young and older adults. Young and older participants were presented with pictures that were associated with descriptive labels at encoding. At retrieval, they were cued with the labels and were asked to rate the vividness of their memory for the associated picture and to recall as many details of the picture as possible. On average, older adults assigned higher vividness ratings but recalled fewer episodic details than young adults. Mixed-effects modelling revealed that the relationship between subjective (vividness) and objective (number of recalled details) recollection across trials was stronger in young than in older participants. These findings provide evidence that older adults not only retrieve fewer episodic details but also rely on these details to a lesser extent than young adults for judging the subjective quality of their memories.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• aging
• recollection
• vividness
• subjective remembering

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Fund for Research in Human Science and the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRESH/FRS-FNRS) and a grant from the Alzheimer’s Association (2016-NIRG-394141). The authors wish to thank Christian Monseur for his help in data analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We refer to recollection quantity to designate the number of details retrieved within an event (i.e., the number of recalled details in a free-recall task) while recollection quality refers to the type or the nature of retrieved details (i.e., correct vs. incorrect details or visual details vs. thoughts). This differs from the study of Wong et al. (2012) in which recollection quantity designated the number of correctly remembered items (which corresponds to a measure of hits) while recollection quality referred to the number of features/details retrieved for each item (which corresponds to what we refer to as recollection quantity).

2 The material used in the current study can be obtained upon request.

3 Free-recall data (both recordings and transcriptions) are in French but can be obtained upon request.

4 We applied Greenhouse-Geisser corrections because the sphericity assumption was violated.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fund for Scientific Research in Human Science and the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRESH/FRS-FNRS) and a grant from the Alzheimer’s Association (grant number 2016-NIRG-394141).