Shared event memory in aging: Across-participants similarity of vividness judgements decreases with age

ABSTRACT

When they remember the same events, humans recollect common episodic traces. For making vividness judgements, older adults rely less than young adults on retrieved episodic details. Here, we examined the similarity of the subjective experience of remembering and the associated memory content across participants and we investigated age-effects. Young and older adults studied pictures associated with labels. At retrieval, participants judged the vividness of their memories and recalled pictures details. We examined the similarity of vividness judgements and memory recall across-participants. Across-participants similarity in vividness judgements was higher in young than in older adults, while no age-difference in the similarity of the richness of memory recall between participants was found. Together, these findings suggest that older adults’ vividness ratings are less similar from one participant to another than those of young adults, which may be explained by how older adults use memory details to frame their sense of memory vividness.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• aging
• vividness
• subjective remembering
• shared memory

Acknowledgments

We thank Dylan Elhadar for his help in data collection and analyses.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Data and scripts used in this article can be found at: https://osf.io/7qbm5/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS) under grant number (F 06/40/05 – FRESH/FC) attributed to AF and under grant number (F 03/05/05 – FRIA/FC) attributed to NV. CB is a Research Associate at the FRS-FNRS.