Age differences in autobiographical memory across the adult lifespan: older adults report stronger phenomenology

ABSTRACT

As an individual’s life story evolves across adulthood, the subjective experience (phenomenology) of autobiographical memory likely changes. In addition to age at retrieval, both the recency of the memory and the age when a memory is formed may be particularly important to its phenomenology. The present work examines the effect of three temporal factors on phenomenology ratings: (a) age of the participant, (b) age at the event reported in the memory, and (c) memory age (recency). A large sample of Americans (N = 1120), stratified by chronological age, recalled and rated two meaningful memories, a Turning Point and an Early Childhood Memory. Ratings of phenomenology (e.g., vividness of turning points) were higher among older adults compared to younger adults. Memories of events from the reminiscence bump were more positive in valence than events from other time periods but did not differ on other phenomenological dimensions; recent memories had stronger phenomenology than remote memories. In contrast to phenomenology, narrative content was generally unrelated to participant age, age at the event, or memory age. Overall, the findings indicate age-related differences in how meaningful memories are re-experienced.

KEYWORDS:

• Age of participant
• age at the event
• autobiographical memory
• memory age
• phenomenology

Acknowledgements

There were no funding sources for this study. Part of the data reported here was presented in a doctoral dissertation completed by Dr Luchetti at the University of Bologna, Department of Psychology. Dr Luchetti is no longer at the University of Bologna.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Martina Luchetti http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7370-8443

Notes

1 Data were screened creating a series of flag variables. First, IP address was used to identify possible duplicate cases (i.e., those who completed the survey more than one time). Then, open-ended answers were examined to identify invalid cases (e.g., non-words, non-sense memory narratives such as “life is beautiful”) and respondents who gave the same score to every item of self-report questionnaires were identified as straight-liners. This results in a final sample of 1120 respondents with at least one valid memory (N = 1057 with Turning Point and N = 1007 with Early Childhood Memory). In addition, speeders were flagged (i.e., those who took less than 10 minutes to complete the survey; N = 85); the survey also included a bogus item (i.e., “Soccer is played with a bat”, from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree) to detect careless respondents (N = 63 somewhat or strongly agreed). Analyses performed excluding inattentive participants replicated the results presented here.

2 46.8% of the sample completed the memory task (Block 1) first and 53.2% of the sample completed the questionnaires (Block 2) first. Half of the participants recalled the Turning Point Memory first, while the other half recalled the Early Childhood Memory first. Independent t-tests were performed to test order effects on the memory measures; only 14 of 56 tests were significant.

3 In addition to the Memory Task, the survey included a series of self-report questionnaires, such as the Patient Health Questionnaire depression module (PHQ-9; Spitzer, Kroenke, Williams, & Patient Health Questionnaire Primary Care Study Group, 1999), which identify clinical symptoms of depression (see online supplemental material). In the current sample, PHQ-9 scores ranged from 0 to 27 (M = 5.3, SD = 6.0); only 18.9% of participants (N = 205) scored ≥10 cut-off (Kroenke, Spitzer, Williams, & Löwe, 2010). Given the well-known influence of depressive disorders on autobiographical memory (i.e., impairments in the ability to identify a single event located in space and time; Sumner, 2012; Williams et al., 2007 for reviews), we included PHQ-9 scores as covariate in the analyses. The effect of age remain significant for most of MEQ scales, except for Accessibility of Turning Point Memory (F_(4,977)= 2.08, p = .081, _pη² = 0.01). That is, memory phenomenology changed with age, independent of participants’ depressive symptoms.