Impact of age-relevant goals on future thinking in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how personal goals influence age differences in episodic future thinking. Research suggests that personal goals change with age and like autobiographical memory, future thinking is thought to be organised and impacted by personal goals. It was hypothesised that cueing older adults with age-relevant goals should modulate age differences in episodic details and may also influence phenomenological characteristics of imagined scenarios. Healthy younger and older adults completed the Future Thinking Interview [Addis, D. R., Wong, A. T., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). Age-related changes in the episodic simulation of future events. Psychological Science, 19(1), 33–41. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02043.x] adapted to activate age-appropriate goals. Narratives were scored with an established protocol to obtain objective measures of episodic and semantic details. Subjective features such as emotionality and personal significance showed age differences as a function of goal domain while other features (e.g., vividness) were unaffected. However, consistent with prior reports, older adults produced fewer episodic details than younger adults and this was not modulated by goal domain. The results do not indicate that goal activation affects level of episodic detail. With respect to phenomenological aspects of future thinking, however, younger adults show more sensitivity to goal activation, compared with older adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Future thinking
• goals
• motivation
• autobiographical memory
• cognitive aging

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank Stephanie Yung, Ryan Williams and Ryan Marinacci for their assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As the positive PANAS scores (pre-FTI) correlated with the emotional valence ratings and because these scores significantly differed between younger and older adults, an ANCOVA was run using them as a covariate. The pattern of results changed only slightly: the main effect of age became significant, F(1, 64) = 4.01, p = .049, , whereas before it was only a trend. The other effects were unchanged.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; 358797-2013 to J. S.).