How retellings shape younger and older adults' memories

Abstract

The way a story is retold influences the way it is later remembered; after retelling an event in a biased manner, people subsequently remember the event in line with their distorted retelling. This study tested the hypothesis that this should be especially true for older adults. To test this, older and younger adults retold a story to be entertaining, to be accurate, or did not complete an initial retelling. Later, all participants recalled the story as accurately as possible. On this final test, younger adults were unaffected by how they had previously retold the story. In contrast, older adults had better memory for the story's content and structure if they had previously retold the story accurately. Furthermore, for older adults, greater usage of story-telling language during the retelling was associated with lower subsequent recall. In summary, retellings exerted a greater effect on memory in older, compared with younger, adults.

Keywords:

• Aging
• Memory distortion
• Memory retrieval
• Narrative
• Storytelling

We are thankful to Albert Aboseif, Jaime Castrellon, Josh Faskowitz, Rohit Jayakar, Marjorie Johnson, Grant Schandler, John Sweet, Sydney Tomito, Lau'ren Thomas, Rico Velasco and Ringo Yip for research assistance. We are also thankful to Dr. Elizabeth Marsh for providing us with the story, and the segmentation of the story into idea units.

This research was in part supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging [grant number T32-AG00037], [grant number R01-AG025340], [grant number R01-AG038043], and [grant number K02-AG032309].

We are thankful to Albert Aboseif, Jaime Castrellon, Josh Faskowitz, Rohit Jayakar, Marjorie Johnson, Grant Schandler, John Sweet, Sydney Tomito, Lau'ren Thomas, Rico Velasco and Ringo Yip for research assistance. We are also thankful to Dr. Elizabeth Marsh for providing us with the story, and the segmentation of the story into idea units.

This research was in part supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging [grant number T32-AG00037], [grant number R01-AG025340], [grant number R01-AG038043], and [grant number K02-AG032309].

Notes

¹ Participants were randomly assigned to condition; but age of the older adults significantly differed between the three retelling conditions. Older adults randomly assigned to the accuracy retelling condition were significantly younger (M = 66.94 years, SD = 4.97) than those assigned to the entertaining retelling (M = 71.90, SD = 7.19) or no-initial retelling conditions (M = 73.40, SD = 8.46). Importantly, when looking only at the younger–older adults in this sample (i.e., those 79 or below), which equates age between the three conditions, none of the reported patterns of results change.

² In the current study, we used only one retelling and a 25-minute delay, rather than the multiple retellings and 4-day delay employed by Dudukovic et al. (2004). These methodological changes were made to avoid floor effects in older adults’ recall. Furthermore, other research suggests that younger adults’ recall can be affected by a single biased retelling (e.g., Tversky & Marsh, 2000).

³ Stories in the accuracy retelling condition contained more perception related words than stories in the entertaining retelling condition. This may have been driven by the specific retelling instructions used. Within the accuracy retelling condition, participants were asked to imagine that their audience was a police officer or a lawyer—i.e., an individual who likely cares about the perceptual details of the environments in which the events took place. It is unknown whether this trend would also emerge when people try to tell stories accurately to friends, or to other audiences.

⁴ Although linguistic differences as a function of retelling condition disappeared, linguistic differences as a function of age remained. Older adults were more likely to tell their stories in past tense and used fewer filler words, fewer negative emotion words and fewer positive emotion words (a numeric trend that was present during the initial retellings). There was also a numeric trend for older adults to use more perception-related words (although this did not reach significance after correcting for multiple comparisons). Novel to the final recollections, the age difference in profanity use disappeared, F < 1. This is likely because people used profanity in the initial retellings to entertain and hence did not use it frequently during their final recalls. Furthermore, in contrast to the initial retellings, older adults used fewer words than younger adults to complete their retellings, F(1, 116) = 7.81, MSE = 90205.50, p = .006, (although this did not reach our adjusted level of statistical significance).

⁵ Numerically, the same pattern emerged when examining how the organisation of the initial retellings compared to the organisation of the final recall (rather than comparing how the organisation of each retelling compared to the original story). For younger adults, there was high consistency between the organisation of their initial retelling and the organisation of their final recall. This was numerically more true for younger adults in the accuracy retelling condition (.97) compared to younger adults in the entertaining retelling condition (.95). In contrast, older adults had less consistency in their two retellings, and this did not depend upon their retelling condition (accuracy retelling condition: .92; entertaining retelling condition: .93). Note that one older adult from the entertaining condition who only had a correlation of .05 between the two retellings was removed from this analysis.