Shift happens: aging alters the content but not the organization of memory for complex events

ABSTRACT

While cognitive aging research has compared episodic memory accuracy between younger and older adults, less work has described differences in how memories are encoded and recalled. This is important for memories of real-world experiences, since there is immense variability in which details can be accessed and organized into narratives. We investigated age effects on the organization and content of memory for complex events. In two independent samples (N = 45; 60), young and older adults encoded and recalled the same short-movie. We applied a novel scoring on the recollections to quantify recall accuracy, temporal organization (temporal contiguity, forward asymmetry), and content (perceptual, conceptual). No age-effects on recall accuracy nor on metrics of temporal organization emerged. Older adults provided more conceptual and non-episodic content, whereas younger adults reported a higher proportion of event-specific information. Our results indicate that age-related differences in episodic recall reflect distinctions in what details are assembled from the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• aging
• free recall
• content
• organization

Acknowledgments

We thank Bianca Adjei, Kayla Williams, and Calourin Shehata for their assistance with memory scoring. This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) grants to Dr. Karen L. Campbell (RGPIN-2017- 03804) and Dr. Signy Sheldon (RGPIN-2015-04241).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

De-identified data for the Replication sample, analytic code, and stimulus information are available at the OSF (https://osf.io/jq438/). Data for the Original sample is available upon request. The stimulus used is under copyright and cannot be shared. For this reason, we have included a document with event annotations, time stamps, and event numbers in the link above. Given that open ended responses contained potentially identifying information, we only provide the scored data. All statistical analyses were conducted using R (version 3.2.2; R Core Team, 2017) and required packages for each analysis are listed in the Results section, including each package’s version number. Neither the study design nor the analytic plans were pre-registered.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [RGPIN-2015-04241].