The dynamics of memory for United States presidents in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT

Serial position effects are often observed within the free recall of unassociated words but also when recalling items from a semantic category like U.S. presidents. We investigated the dynamics of recall for U.S. presidents in younger and older adults to examine potential age-related differences in the organisation of retrieval from semantic long-term memory. Older adults recalled more presidents than younger adults and also demonstrated dual serial position effects such that, in addition to overall serial position effects, primacy (e.g., Eisenhower) and recency presidents (e.g., Obama) within older adults’ lifetime were better recalled than presidents from the middle of their lives (e.g., Ford). Additionally, participants initiated recall with the most distinct presidents (highly familiar or memorable presidents like Washington, Obama, Trump), and conditional-response probabilities revealed that presidents from similar eras were recalled in close proximity, indicating that the retrieval of distinct presidents can facilitate memory for presidents from a similar era. Collectively, we demonstrate the potential interplay of the mechanisms that influence the organisation of retrieval such that distinctiveness and temporal contiguity effects may simultaneously impact recall. Specifically, semantic and temporal-contextual associations can drive semantic autobiographical memory and people likely organise retrieval from long-term memory according to familiarity and distinctiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Serial position effects
• aging
• semantic memory
• distinctiveness
• lag-recency effects

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Karina Agadzhanyan, Stephen Huckins, Marissa Pennino, Jesse Kuehn, Khushboo Doultani, Chelsea Mejia, and Cherice Chan for their assistance with data collection. Additionally, we thank Grace Roseman and Drew Murphy for their assistance in coding the data. We also thank Nash Unsworth for providing helpful syntax used for calculating conditional-response probabilities and Matt Rhodes for helpful comments regarding the manuscript. Finally, we thank Gene Brewer for helpful insight into lag-recency analyses.

Disclosure statement

The authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organisation or entity with any financial or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Notes

1 While other research has used higher age cutoffs for older adults, we used a lower cutoff that allows for more of a middle age/lifespan approach. Although we acknowledge that this lower minimum age differs from studies that use an older cutoff, in the context of studying cognitive aging, learning more about younger-older adults is also informative.

2 Although there have been 45 presidencies, there have only been 44 presidents (Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th president) and we only counted the recall of Grover Cleveland as correct for position 22 (we did not include serial position 24 in any analyses).

3 Although younger adults also appear to demonstrate a primacy effect within recency presidents (as seen in Figure 1), this was driven by the excellent recall of John F. Kennedy, not elevated recall of multiple presidents from that era.

4 Although the three-way interaction was not significant, perhaps due to only four presidencies occurring during younger adults’ lifetimes, younger adults appeared to prefer to move in the backward direction using 1 lag increments (i.e., recalling Trump, then Obama, then Bush, etc.) when recalling presidents who served during their lives.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Aging: [grant number R01 AG044335].